Sunflowers

Sunflowers

The girl sat uncomfortable on a small plastic chair and fiddled with the bottom of her gingham dress. Too hot and nothing to see here. A bluebottle hit itself against the window, dumb and furious, its sick, fuzzing whine punctuated by thuds. Outside there was back door of the school’s kitchen, the bin bags ready for collection shining fat and slick with yesterday’s scrapings of rice pudding and carrot. She felt heavy and queasy in her stomach when she thought about the bins, the soft hot squish of thin plastic skin over disgusting soup, the wasps – horrid things - that twitched and swerved about them on magnetic currents. Somebody could get you and make you eat it. She shuddered. She was seven.

A spot of sun came in and lit up the scissors in their brightly-papered tins. They made special scissors for left-handed children. There were only two pairs and they sat in their own pot, the blades rusted and sticky with old glue.

There were five chairs around every table in the room but the other four places at the table where the girl sat were empty. The class whispered, frowning over their drawings. Some gawped at the wall, waiting their turn for the crayons; others scrubbed busily at the cheap sugar-paper with sticks of waxy green. Each table was given a fistful of crayons from the big tub on the teacher’s desk, so the girl was lucky. She didn’t need to fight over the dwindling stubs and could take her time, tracing the shape methodically over the folds.

- This is what I want you to do, the teacher had said.

There was a new picture on the wall. The picture was covered in thick, shining plastic which made it hard to look at. The fluorescent lights overhead made bent ripples all over the painting that you weren’t meant to see but did.

- It’s called Sunflowers, said Mrs. Rawson. By Vincent Van Gogh. He was a French artist.

- My cousin’s French, Philip shouted out. Miss. My cousin.

Mrs. Rawson was forty-five, a lizardy woman with skin sunbedded into cheap orange leather and a small head topped with canary frizz. Her sharp voice was streaked with brass. Sometimes when she spoke she hissed through her teeth like a goose, like the geese that rose up with their darning-needle tongues if you got too close to the pond. When they did poetry she jabbed her two fingers forward in a point to make them keep to the rhythm

- ALL along the BACKwater
THROUGH the rushes TALL,
DUCKS are a-DABbling UP tails ALL -

Her real name was Marianne but you couldn’t call her that.

Mrs. Rawson was vile, the girl thought. She was hot; her neck itched. She rolled a sock into a thick donut round her ankle and pulled it up again. She tucked her leg beneath her and sat on her foot until it fizzed and went numb.


The teacher came round the class and gave everyone a long rectangle of paper.

- This is what you do, she said. Fold the paper into four. Like this.

She held up her paper and folded the top piece down, then the next and the next, like a concertina.

- Even sizes.

- Miss, when do we –
- Wait.

The girl thought that the picture of the sunflowers was no good. They didn’t look like that. Last year in Mr Jones’s class they had grown sunflowers for a competition. Everybody got a seed, and you had to plant it in a little pot and take it home and look after it until it sprouted. The seed was wonderful. It was a narrow thing with fine zebra-stripes, like a barcode or a humbug. Michael Watson put his in his mouth and ate it, but Mr Jones gave him another one. The pots were decorated with each person’s name and stickers, golden dots, red stars.

She took the sunflower home and put it in the bathroom window where the sun could get to it. She watered the black soil every day.

The next week they were supposed to measure the seedling and draw it in their diaries. The others drew fat green circles, wrote the height in pencil (in centimetres please.) She waited. She watered it twice a day, cupping her hands under the tap. Next Monday it was the same. The sunflowers were five, seven, nine centimetres. This time she copied a picture from someone’s diary, wrote SIX AND A HALF CENTIMETRES underneath. She drew a smiling sun next to the plant pot. – Good, said the teacher.

At the end of the month they had to bring their sunflowers back in and Mr Jones would measure them. The pot of waterlogged soil sat on the bathroom windowsill, a secret, clenched shame.

She couldn’t sleep; when everyone had gone to bed she sat on the stairs in the dark, pulling her nightdress over her knees. She traced the raised patterns of the wallpaper with a finger, finding ways from one side to the other between glossy white grains. It was a map of the Arctic: an explorer was lost, wandering alone in the silent frozen wastes of the Pole. Above him danced the Northern lights, spectral rose, iridium green.

The next morning the others trumpeted their way into school. Strong fleshy stalks thick as a thumb; fat dark green buds peeling at the tips, flat leaves sprouting fine hairs. Some teetered from canes tied with strands of wool. Ranks of Roman centurions raising their shields to the ceiling.

- What a lot of green fingers, the teacher said.

That evening, she went to her little brother in his room.

- Did you touch my plant?
- No
- Did you stick your fingers into the soil, did you?
- No
- There was a seed in there. Did you touch it? It was for school. Did you do it?

He was two; he loved her. He was gentle and soft. His hair was white feathers, his eyes were round and he dribbled when he spoke. He was sweet. He didn’t understand things. He clung to his toys, his cloth rabbit, his Fireman Sam. She slapped his face, hard. He sobbed and sobbed.

- When you’ve folded the paper, Mrs. Rawson said, I want you to draw a picture of the flower. JUST THE HEAD OF THE FLOWER. ON THE TOP FOLD. Do you understand?

They nodded, yes.

- And then, on the next fold, you draw the part of the stalk below the head of the flower. And the first leaves. Then, on the THIRD fold, you draw the bottom leaves, and on the LAST fold, the BOTTOM fold, you draw the pot. Now. Is that clear?

- Is that clear, everyone?
- Yes, Mrs. Rawson.
- And DON’T get any on the table.

She began to colour the picture. She rolled the crayons between her fingers; some of them still had the labels attached. She loved the names of the crayons, listed in order on the back of the big tin box:

Magenta
Burnt Sienna
Peach
Sunset Orange
Razzle Dazzle Rose
Teal
Violet
Ultramarine

The pots were to be done in red, like a Christmas tree. It was difficult to make the crayon go in a straight line all the way up and the stalk wavered and bent. The leaves were all one colour, fat lobes matching on either side. Careful to colour in properly over the joins.

On the table next door Jemma put her hand up.

- Miss

Jemma was a model pupil. She had a long plait that went halfway down her back, tied at the bottom with a blue scrunchie.

- I’m finished, Miss.
- Bring it here, then.

Jemma pushed back her chair. It knocked against the edge of the girl’s table, jogging her hand. She glared.

- Very good, Jemma. Very nice.

Mrs Rawson took Jemma’s drawing and put it on the right-hand side of her desk in the Display pile. The children nearest craned to look.

- No, no. Do your own, please.

Something hard and sudden stung her ear. A bit of rubber had bounced off the table and lay on the floor. She turned round to see a table of the older boys with their faces laughing, shut hard against her. She turned away. Their whispers sent tin-tacks of red pain into the back of her neck. She pulled the sleeves of her jumper down over her hands, which she had been told not to do, and pushed her thumb through the hole in the cuff, making it bigger. She began to chew her pencil, the sour, nasty paint cracking into flakes that stuck to her teeth. She removed it from her mouth and studied the dents her teeth had made; began, methodically, to press the wood into her upper front teeth one side of the hexagon at a time, marking an indented bracelet around the base. She looked down at the picture. She sighed and rested her head on the table, flat on her palms. She blew a spit bubble gently, then another.

- Sarah!

She started up. There was a choke of sniggers. She pulled her fingers back through the proper cuff of her jumper.

- Have you finished?

She nodded.

- Well then, don’t sit there and go to sleep – bring it to me.

The table left a smudged feeling on her cheek, but when she rubbed at it there was nothing there. She clutched the drawing in her hand and set it down in front of the teacher. Mrs. Rawson was writing something. She put down her pen without looking at the girl and picked up the sunflower picture, letting it fall open.

- What’s this?

Out of nowhere, a blank section appeared in the paper. It had been folded into five pieces, not four. A handspan’s worth of nothing showed in the centre of the stalk.

- Oh now, look. That’s not good, is it?

Mrs Rawson spoke in her Monday voice, a spiked, trailing rasp. She pinched the drawing between the ends of her nails. She stood up from her desk and held it up to the class. The girl’s heart kicked like a sick frog. She looked down.

- Children stop drawing. Wait a moment please I want you to look and see what Sarah’s done.

The class stared, mute, bristling, a single animal.

- This picture is spoiled. I want you all to stop and check that you haven’t made the same mistake. That’s why you need to listen. You must always listen.

- OK, Miss.

The reptile released the paper from its claws. The amphibian, pinned to the spot, squinted through her eyelashes at the class; a trick she had learned to make them disappear. Smirks blurred into patches and smears of peach, burnt sienna, umber, aubergine. The sunflower picture was back in her hand; she clutched it, hot and careless, along with the chewed pencil. As she passed the boys’ table one of them stuck out his chair.

- Let me see
- No

Garry was a year older than her. His parents lived on the other side of the village. He had a lot of friends; even the year sixes let him play football. He snatched the paper from her.

- Ha. Good one, stupid.

A laugh burst out, brazen as trumpets. She took the bitten pencil and jabbed it as hard as she could at his arm. He jumped back with a scream, all jaunt evaporated.
There was a silence. The air in the room swelled, then cracked into a thousand pieces. Mrs Rawson snatched her arm, rough. Shook her. The pencil fell to the floor. The teacher turned to Garry and carefully pushed up the sleeve of his jumper. The lead point had gone through the wool and into his skin, a tiny dot of grey on white. Everybody gasped, in shock, in disgust. She stood alone, quivering, sorry sorry really sorry I didn’t mean it sorry

Mrs Rawson pulled her across the room to the doorway.

- What did you do? Why? Why?

The teacher pushes her face into the girl’s, shouting. She stares at the lizardy lines around the teacher’s mouth. She triumphs inwardly over her yellow teeth. She is caught in the stink of her hairspray, the dishwater roughness of her hands. She watches the goose’s tongue flick back and forth.

- You will stay in this lunchtime, in the hall, and you will write this out fifty times - I am a naughty spiteful girl - in your best handwriting. And you will write a letter apologising to Garry for what you did. You will bring these to me.

She shakes her again.

Garry stands in the other corner, rubbing his arm, tearful. He is surrounded by fussing. Sam pats his hand. Molly gives him the chocolate out of her lunchbox. They stare at the girl, righteous, little priests. They are all good children in the love of God.

- Do you understand?

Her head buzzed with shame. She stared down at the pattern of blue and brown tiles on the floor. In the Infants they played a game where the blue was the sea and the brown was the land and there were sharks in the sea. If you were standing on the blue tile and somebody yelled shark you would drown.



After lunch is over she sits in the hall. The dinner ladies are clearing the tables away, and they try to make her go outside.

- Miss said –

- Oh, you have lines, do you? Well, then. Well.
- What did you do? said another.
- Nothing

When they have gone she clambers up on the display set up for the Harvest Festival. It is really just the blocks they use for gym and for the Christmas play stacked up in a pyramid and covered with astroturf. Spacegrass, star-grass. Piled all over are melons and corn-on-the-cob and tins of kidney beans. She feels sick again, thinking of the kidney beans. She makes her way to the top, knocking over a can of best-before pineapple chunks, and spreads the blank paper in front of her.

I am a naughty spiteful girl

She wishes she had a book to lean on. The heavy curtains are drawn cool against the afternoon. Syrupy sun glows through the cracks.

She lay on her front on the top row of the pyramid feeling the bristles scratch and prickle her stomach. She dangled her scuffed shoes over the side, foolishly high; she could fall and break open her head. She let the pencil drift along the page, pretending it was only a picture she was drawing, swirled piggy-tails on the m and h and n. I, am a naughty, spiteful, girl. She had drawn it ten times now.

She felt someone watching her. She glanced around the empty hall. At the window, she saw Jemma and two other girls from the class looking through a chink in the curtains. They jostled each other, laughing and peering. A Hydra of pretty cardigans and pointing fingers. Three sweet little girls and one naughty spiteful one.

She pretended she hadn’t seen. She picked up her pencil and began to tap it deliberately against the nearest can. Tap, tap. Again. She began to whistle, moved her head from side to side, tapping away. She was aware that the girls were watching. She began to sing a tune with no words and bounced her feet up and down. She kicked her legs in time. Tap tap. The faces were there, still staring, but uncertain now, confused. The letters, T H A N K G O D F O R G O O D H A R V E S T shone out in brilliant blue over her head.

She began to sing louder, bobbing her head, twirling the pencil. A song her mother played sometimes in the car

- Once had love, and into the gas
Summertime now, and a heart of glass

Oh and she’s having a good time, up there on the Harvest Festival display. She picks up an apple, and rolls it along the ledge. It knocks over somebody’s paper mache bun.

- Strike!

She clambers down a level and sits on a pumpkin. It’s a space hopper, she’s Cinderella magicking to the ball. She gathers some cans and stacks them up. Tinned tomatoes and Ambrosia custard. Five at the bottom, then three, then one. An orange on top for luck. She bowls the apple again but they don’t fall. She throws hard and they tumble, a cascade of shiny thumps. She sings louder. She begins to dance, twirling, jumping. The gang of girls press against the window. They want to get in. She turns and looks at them, victorious. She stands amidst the harvest, queen of unwanted kitchen-cupboard produce. She looks and they see her looking, and then they are pretending to sing, gasping like fish, copying her, jerking their heads stupidly like puppets at a song they don’t even know. They mop and gurn and laugh and laugh. They are holding hands and singing and laughing and falling down.

At the end of the day, she waited in the toilets until they had all gone. She breathed into the mirror and pressed her fingers onto it, drawing fat, squiggling shapes in the mist. The cleaning lady arrives. Sometimes she saves her a bottle of milk if it there’s one left over from the little infants.

- Come on now. Home.

She pushed open the door and walked alone through the empty playground to the road beyond. In the fields out over by the church the sun was a fat gold bee smiling above the children that chased and jumped and ran, treading seeds into the earth for ever and ever and ever.

Hide and Seek

Hide and Seek

‘One – two – three – coming, ready or not!’

I knew where she was, of course. I always knew where she was. It would have been difficult for any three-year-old to hide properly in a garden like that, plus this particular specimen lacked imagination; she was still narcissist enough to believe, as much younger children do, that if she couldn’t see me then I wasn’t able to see her. I opened my eyes a crack and sure enough, there she was – half-crouched behind the closest tree-stump.

‘Isabella,’ I called. ‘Isabella! Where are you?’ I began to pretend to search. I peered into the space under a holly bush, the prickles snagging at my hair.  ‘No, she’s not there…or there…Isa-bella!’ I turned about, feigning bemusement. My theatrics were clumsy, but effective enough. There was a stifled giggle.

‘Isabella, where are you? Where could she be?’

It was a sultry day. An unpleasant, clammy sun throbbed down across the unshaded spaces between the trees in the long low garden. Headache weather. I turned and headed in the other direction, back towards the stump where she had attemped to hide. Slowly, craning my neck with the exaggerated inquisitiveness of a street mime, I moved around the tree.

‘Isabella! Is she lost?’

We had been playing this tedious game for what felt like hours.  The counting, the hiding, the calling, the feigned astonishment, repeated in sequence until I was hoarse. I had been desperate to leave the house, to escape from her constant requests to play nursery, to be sat down uncomfortably on the rough carpet and chastised like one of her dolls or, which was worse, to be repeatedly ‘taken to the toilet’ and made to pretend to squat against the wall before having my hands washed, being sat down with a piece of plastic fruit and then seconds later made to perform the entire ritual again. This could if not checked by some means continue without losing its appeal for much of the afternoon.

At first, I was curious about her games – for the insight I thought they might give me into the development of the human mind. Each afternoon I watched her conduct these pantomime renactments of her mornings spent at the expensive private nursery. It was interesting, the way her infantile brain attached itself so firmly to the performance of discipline and routine – she loved to recite the rules of the nursery and to tell off the dolls for imagined offences – rather than to the adult’s idea of the favoured activities of the sandpit, the finger-paints, the water tray.

All these things were dispensed with at Isabella’s nursery. Children were admitted, made to answer to the register, and lined up to be punished. She moved, a minature Gradgrind, through the ranks of her unruly pupils, shouting, washing hands, administering snacks, enforcing silence until a sinner was dismissed to the naughty corner. She never seemed to tire. Perched on the horsehair sofa with her little legs sticking out in front of her, brows knitted, she would pretend to read a story to her errant pupils. Very quickly, I grew to dread these games – the imperious tug on the wrist, the shrieks of outrage, the ceaseless repetition. As time went by I tried my best to avoid playing nursery - not merely from weariness but from some sense that it was a bad idea to permit her to be in a position of authority over me, even in games. I made excuses, stretching out the washing-up as long as possible, beginning the dinner preparations much earlier than was necessary. She would stand by my side and whine, asking when was I going to be finished with the job at ten-second intervals, until the endless explanations became more wearisome than acquiescence. Eventually, though, I convinced her that I must be busy with this or that, or such-and-such would go wrong or not happen, and she would leave me alone. This often took a long time. Today, I had not had strength for such a battle or the patience to endure the game, and so I had proclaimed a visit to the gardens.

‘Issy! Bella! Where could that girl be?’

The garden was not outside the house itself, which was an enormous grey Georgian building in a respectable part of town. The houses on the street where the family lived seemed to stand on tiptoe, drawing their neat skirts away from the pavement. There were railings with clematis, and brass heritage plaques, and polite notices relating to the chaining of one’s bicycle. The garden was only a few streets away from their house – five minutes’ walk to an adult – but I generally baulked at attempting it. First, there was the battle to coax her to go, which was never easy as the stock response to any scheme not of her own devising was a negative. Then came the finding of the shoes, strewn amid upended mountains of toys, her cardigan, coat, packet of organic oatcakes,  juices and a ball to play with, along with anything else that could be crammed into my bag that might in an emergency stave off a tantrum. Then there was a matter of getting there, up a steep hill and across several busy roads, which, she had lately decided, she was experienced enough to cross without assistance. This had led to several instances where I had to snatch her arm and pull her, screaming, across the street. It was these moments, more than anything else, that left me white-faced and tight with anger. The sheer arrogance of the child to suppose that she knew better than me – the superiority in her voice when she piped up that it was ‘safe to go, we’re going now,’ despite not being tall enough to see above the parked cars’ bonnets, her smugness when we reached the other side unscathed. ‘There weren’t any cars. You didn’t know. You got it wrong, didn’t you?’ I could have slapped her face for that, but she was never slapped. She was never punished for anything.

‘Where is she? I can’t find her anywhere!’

Part of the fury I felt in these moments was the fear of her getting hurt. Of course it was. You must understand that I didn’t want that. I would panic if she reached towards a gas flame or grabbed unthinkingly at a knife, as any mother would. I told her she was not on any circumstances to climb up while I was cooking, that it wasn’t safe, but she would do it all the same, dragging her little chair over while my back was turned. You cannot watch them every second of every day. And I never in my life – never – raised a hand to her – I never hit or pushed or grabbed or made any rough move towards her, unless it was to get her out of danger. I barely even raised my voice towards her – perhaps a handful of times. Oh, outside I was the perfect image of affection. An onlooker would not have had any inkling of how I really felt. I talked to her, endlessly, indulged her, praised her, feigned an interest in her work, read her books, spent hours drawing pictures with her. It was me who taught her to count, to write her name, to tell the time. I did not love her, but I took care of her and was kind. I smiled and laughed and told her how clever she was, and I played games until I could stand it no longer.

‘Isabella! Where on earth can she have got to?’

She was a spoiled child, very spoiled indeed. Not materially, considering – she had no flash clothes, although goodness knows she had more neat, plain, expensively comfortable dresses than I or my other siblings ever did. No, not materially, perhaps, but she was indulged in every other way. She never heard a ‘no’ that meant no, a no that could withstand an angry stare or threatening lip or a pleading whine. She ruled the roost. If she was ever spectacularly naughty – throwing her lunch to the floor, kicking another child – her mother would throw out a lazy – ‘Don’t, darling,’ while ruffling her hair or kissing her cheek. Her mother would hear no criticism against her daughter. Isabella hated it when her mother and I talked together while she was in the room – she would scream for attention, and her mother would hold up a hand to silence me while she asked, full of sweetness, what it was the child wanted. She never wanted anything, of course, but it didn’t seem to matter. I thought of my own childhood, the turned back, the hands bundling me into my room and locking the door. More than anything, I think I came close to hating Isabella for this.

‘Isabella!’

The garden itself was a dull place, in my opinion – a sunken expanse of green lawns, orderly rhododendrons and a few cherry trees, designed to accord to the principles of propriety rather than beauty. It was certainly not worth the thousands of pounds paid each year to retain a key to it. The sun only touched the grass in the centre for a few hours around noon, and the spaces under the trees were worn and scuffed with as-yet-unswept twigs and dead blossom. It was a false garden. There was nothing truly vital about it – no profusion of wildflowers or sly nettles, cloak and dagger in the underbrush. Birds kept their distance from this mannered place at the tops of the stately trees, and the only animals in the garden were the dogs of the rich being briskly exercised in the empty hours that sat between luncheon and the evening’s engagements.

Nevertheless, before I saw it, I had imagined the garden as a godsend, a divine deliverance from those silent, expensively-furnished rooms with their high ceilings and mahogany tickings and the endless games of do-as-I-say. That was until I realised that her complete inability to entertain herself extended beyond the borders of the house. I had grown up in the country, and as a child any green space was territory ripe for conquest. Once released into a field, we would dash into every corner, testing the boundaries of the space, throwing ourselves into the deepest thickets and grabbing fistfuls of cow-parsley and campion on the way, creeping along walls, lifting stones for woodlice, scrambling trees for bounty. We were lords of the underbrush, kings of the castle. Isabella, sedate in the garden, merely stood and looked at my bag as if to ask what I was going to do for her now. She had no interest in the hidden caves under the grey-flaking cherry twigs, foaming with blossom, or the bluebells under the shadowy hedge, although I showed her these things, told her their proper names. She walked a few paces this way and that, span around, holding out her frock, and then began to whine to go home.

‘Look,’ I said patiently, ‘look how nice it is here – the sun is out, the birds are singing in the trees. It’s good to be out in the fresh air, isn’t it? You don’t want to stay in the house all day, do you?’

‘I want to go back and play in the house.’

I clenched my teeth. ‘We’ll get some fresh air here first, and then we’ll go back in a bit. OK?’ I sat down on the grass, faking an air of finality that I hoped would fool her. It was like this, always; a constant battle of wills between us. I had an extensive armoury of tricks and diversions at my disposal – flattering her intelligence usually worked. This time, however, there was nothing to be done. I offered her an oatcake which she chewed without relish, asking between each bite how long it would be until we could go.

They were hell to me, these afternoons. You have no idea what it’s like. You don’t have children, or if they do, they’re your children, and the hormonal soup you blink through when you see them distorts them from their true selves like a house of mirrors. Your children – yes, yours – are boring. They are irritating. They disobey and complain and refuse to eat their food, then whine for yours when you try to eat. They upend their toys all over the floor and refuse to pick them up. They break things. They snatch your book from your hands. From the moment they wake all you can do is think of ways to fill the time until they can be put to bed again. They ask the same questions, again and again and again, just to make you speak. They scream. They hate you to spend a single minute alone, banging on the bathroom door for you to come out in the twenty seconds that you are in there. They cannot stand to have you not look at them every second of every day. They are spoiled, spoiled, spoiled. I cannot think why anyone would choose to have them. The myth of children – as merry little sprites gambolling about with your eyes and their own adorable way of talking – is a lie. They are vampires that eat your life, and the moment that they have become bearable company – at around eleven or twelve years old – they no longer want you around.

She was still complaining, and now she was beginning to move away from me up the gravel path towards the gate, knowing I would have to follow. My stomach sinks. I have only one weapon left in my arsenal.

‘Isa-bella,’ I say, in my suggestive, I-have-a-surprise-for-you voice. ‘Shall we play hide and seek?’ She turned, and ran back towards me.

I can see her, crouched into a ball, her limp silky blonde hair almost brushing the ground beneath. I approach the stump.

‘Will I have to call the police?’

This was her cue. ‘No, no, I’m here!’ She smiles, her black eyes little sequins. ‘I was hiding! You didn’t know, did you? You didn’t see me!’ She is dancing with triumph; her neat bob swings from side to side.

‘No, I didn’t know,’ I said. ‘Clever Bella.’ I glance at my watch. If we were to leave then, and allowing fifteen minutes to get back to the house, I can start chopping the vegetables for dinner fifteen minutes after that. That is a fillable amount of time. It will be all right. ‘Shall we go home, now, then?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘Again.’

I resign myself to it. ‘Do you want to hide again, or do you want to count?’

‘I want to hide. You count, and then you call the police.’ She is calm and assured in her instructions.

I turn back to the tree, and began to count, slowly and loudly. Down from ten and up again. I squint through the fingers squeezed over my eyes to see she doesn’t run too far. A blonde speck is fumbling itself into the bushes by the railings. I close them again, and shout.

‘One – two – three – coming, ready or not!’

I turn, and begin to search for her. I say the same things I have been saying all afternoon. I pretend to look under benches, up trees, calling all the while. All the time, I move slowly towards the corner where I know she has gone.

‘Isabella! Where a-a-a-re you?’

The rhododendron bushes by these railing are thick, their dark green soapy leaves forming a wall almost to the grass beneath. A thick, waxy scent rises, of hothouses and pruning-baskets. I walk along the row, looking for feet.

‘Isabella! I can’t see you! Oh no! What will I do?’

I have almost reached the end of the line of rhododendrons, and have yet to find her hiding-place or the gap she must have squeezed through. She has crept underneath; I am surprised; she is generally a fastidious child.

‘Bella! Where’s that girl gone?’

I get down on my hands and knees and peer into the gloom beneath. The smell of crushed soap and loam is stronger, but there is no-one there. She has been clever – she has crept out and hidden somewhere behind me.

‘What will I do? Will I have to call the police?’

I turn around, and wait for the laughter, for the big reveal. I call again, but there is only silence. I move, quicker now, around behind the big trees to the left. They are in an open clearing. There is nobody behind them.

‘Isabella!’ 

My voice is sharper now, strained. I go back to the place where I was counting. I glance back at my bag, her ball, abandoned in the middle of the grass. Nothing.

‘Isabella! Where are you?’

The sun is hot above me; I am wrapped in green stillness, and the gentle piping of invisible birds. A breeze shivers through the garden, and I stop. Call again. Stop. All is quiet. I begin to run, calling, calling, through the orderly park, over the smooth lawns, past the ranks of rhododendrons, through the polite rows of cherry trees, back, back now, up the gravel path that winds, out of sight, up to the open gate.

In the last second before I know she is gone, I know true panic – not for her, but for myself. For what will happen next. I close my eyes. I see our mother, white, shaking, weeping. Screaming. How could you let this happen to your little sister?

How could you have let her happen to me, I think.

I see police cars drawing up, the crackle of radios, cameras, news bulletins, the press. Her picture, copied a hundred thousand times, roughened by pixel enlargement and cheap paper. My picture, too. They will blame me. They will think that I wasn’t doing my job properly. They might even say that I did it. I didn’t, though. I would never hurt her. I just didn’t want to play any more.

Mochyn Bach

It was the Sunday before Christmas, and the day that we were due to go to Howden’s place up in the hills to collect the order of meat. It had been frozen solid for days, and the fields all around the back were quiet under a fat blanket of white. The sky slumped above the bare lattice of the oak wood was the yellow-grey of an old bruise, which meant more snow to come.

The needless scrape and clatter of cookware from downstairs meant that my father was doing the breakfast round of washing-up. He hummed loud as he threw forks into the cutlery drawer, a smashed chord of steel and song.

Upstairs I dressed as fast as I could, pulling on two pairs of trousers and thick wool socks gone shapeless with years of itch. When I was ready I hurried across the hall to my brother’s room. He was three years older than me, and over the last holiday he had metamorphosised into a stranger. His thin face bloomed in a scattering of red spots, which he picked into scabs and sucked off the end of his finger when he thought nobody was looking.

Today he sat at his desk, morose in his dressing gown. He had lately taken to eating breakfast in his room and I perched gingerly on his sofa, avoiding crumpled crisp packets, bits of homework and piles of discarded clothing, watching him spoon enormous lumps of popcorn-yellow cereal into his mouth. Milk rolled down the sides of the spoon, scattering drops on his chin. On the computer screen in front of him was an island in a blue sea, visible in neat squares. He reached out and pressed a key and a row of pixellated Egyptians sprang to life.

‘What’re you playing then?’

‘Dunno. Civilisation.’

‘What’s that?’

‘It’s a game.’ Conversations with my brother had become one-sided of late.

‘How does it work, then?’

He didn’t answer for a moment, slurping the last dribble of sugary milk from the bottom of the thick clay bowl. ‘It’s a game where you’re in charge of the society. You get them to discover things and build them. Take them over. Then you can give them names.’

‘What did you call this place here?’

‘Dunno yet.’

My father is in the hallway.

‘Rhys!’

There is no reply.

‘You up yet? It’s nearly time to go.’

‘I’m not dressed,’ sang my brother.

‘Faint ywr’ gloch yw e?’ my father shouted up the stairs. Rhys frowned and sighed loudly; he had reached the age where everything parents do is mortifying, and my father’s staunch attempts to speak to us in Welsh struck him as embarrassingly redundant. Two years ago it had been a beaming puzzle, bouncing up and down at the breakfast table eager with the answer. In another few years again it would become a secret code, a cosy tradition albeit partaken in with eye-rolling indulgence. I had never grown tired of it, drinking in the rolling, snapping consonants and knife-edged vowels, liking too that it shut out my disapproving, distant mother, who stood at the end of the kitchen with pursed lips stirring her coffee.

Now, though, there was silence. Dad stood at the bottom of the landing waiting for a response. ‘Rhys!’

‘What?’ yelled my brother, not taking his eyes off the computer screen.

‘Well?’

‘Doesn’t matter. I’m not coming.’

‘Please yourself then.’

‘You really not coming?’ I asked him, a bit surprised. He always used to like a trip to the hills.

‘No.’ He turned back to his Egpytians.

I gave up, and wandered out. In the garage, Dad was waiting, pulling on his gloves and jumping up and down on the spot in the chilly air.

The farm where the turkeys were was up from where we were, a few miles down the rickety, bare-hedged lanes at Whitechapel, just below where the fells rose up grey-shouldered and vast in the long, low skies.

All around our place that morning hung the white and thin smell of snow. The earth was frozen into stone ruts that would turn your ankles if you strayed into the thicker drifts at the field’s edge. During the nights the roads froze into thick rink-like sheets that were treacherous as wet glass. Tyres couldn’t bite, and none of the town gritters ever came up this far. I’d fallen twice crossing the yard the day before, even with my thick boots and my mother’s warning yells lodged in my ears. The sluice-brook at the field’s brink was still running but crusted at the edges with rime and dirty slabs of ice, pitted with stones. Icicles formed around the twigs and blades of grass that dipped into the water, dimpling and blurring them like artefacts in a chrysalis. Snow seemed a freak, a miracle, the strangest of weathers. How could it be white, when it was made of tiny flakes of ice?

Why, I asked Dad.

He said he didn’t know.

Now as we turned the corner up the hill we could see, a couple of fields back, the edge of the forest, black pines forming a massed wall against the rutted white. Once this forest went on and on over the fells and into the neighbouring county. Once, my father said, there were wild boar and wolves amongst the trees.

The farm was at the end of a short track. A painted board in the holly bush by the turning read

EGGS

PORK

CHRISTMAS TURKEY’S

RARE BREEDS

The farmer and his family lived in two rickety caravans parked in a muddy patch in front of the outbuildings. He and his wife shared the larger of them, and their two sons the other, a dilapidated towing caravan resting on an unfinished patch of cement. My father told me they’d been trying for three years to get the planning permission to build a house. ‘They have to be there,’ he said, ‘for the business, see. But it’s no kind of life.’ There were two barns, the cattle pens and the smaller shed where hens shivered in their straw. A collie strained, alert, at the end of a tatty nylon rope. His ears were rigid black triangles. I watched him, eyeing the rope, assessing its strength. I was always afraid of dogs.

The vans squatted under the side of the big steel barn. As my father switched off the engine, the door of the larger swung open and the farmer came out, frowning at the unfamiliar jeep. My dad jumped out into the snow and his face relaxed.

‘Now then, Tomos,’ he greeted my father.‘What can I do for you?’

‘I’ve come about the beef,’ said Dad. ‘Spoke to you on the telephone yesterday.’

‘Oh yes,’ the farmer said. ‘I’ll just –‘ he turned back towards the caravan and shouted for his wife. She was an enormous roly-poly woman and she came heavy and smiling down the steel steps towards us. She was wearing open-toed sandals and her feet were forced pinched and red through the gap. The whistle of a kettle on the stove sounded clear inside as the door clicked shut behind her.

Hello, she said. Happy Christmas.

Hello.

I stood awkwardly, my hands in my pockets while the grown-ups talked. I admired the even print of the sole of my boot in the blank unmarked ground. I scraped some of the fresh snow off the top of the car’s wing-mirror and put it gently in my mouth. It began to dissolve at the edges of my lips, soft and cloudy, the cold sending shocks of pain through my teeth. I couldn’t chew it but sucked at it, surprised how little water it yielded. All that massy filigree spun out of nothing. The adults were moving around towards the big door of the barn. I hesitated. As it drew open I caught sight of a pen of straw and the yellow of heat lamps blurred in the grey air. I followed, ten paces back, struggling to draw the bolt shut.

‘It’ll be right, that,’ said the farmer. He had a thin wool jumper with a pattern of snowflakes on it, frayed at the cuffs.

Inside the barn was warm with the heavy smells of animal life. The collie barked sharply when he saw us and was quelled by an angry word from the woman. The black and roan Dexter calves lay placid as  Bethlehem on the hay, rattling their noses in the empty proven bucket. Outside, the wind boomed faintly against the outbuilding walls. Within, there was just the breathing and moving of the animals, rustling and scuffing at the straw.

Beyond were the pigs. There were five suckling sows, each in their own pen, enormous things heavy with pale blood and grunt. Their piglets lay satiated in a wriggling, twitching pile under the heat lamps at the rear of the pen. My father and I stood alongside the farmer, climbing up the gate for a closer look.

‘Those’ll almost ready to wean,’ he said, ‘next week. Eight weeks old they are now.’

‘Gloucester Old Spot, is it?’ asked my father.

‘Oh yes,’ he replied. ‘Aye.’

The smallest pig trotted up to the feed-bowl, keen and nosing. My hand was resting on the top bar of the gate, and I leaned forward, trying to touch. The mother pushed towards me, vaguely threatening, rattling the steel bolt of the gate with her long nose. Her snout was a perfect prehensile triangle, closing in on my hand where I had gripped the cold rung. The little pig stood behind her, dogged but uncertain. It was neat, two greyish-blue spots on its hind flank. Its tail hung limp and uncurled. It was both bald and naked, like a blind baby mouse, and all over delicate fine silken hairs. It quizzed me, sniffing, like its mother.

‘How long till they go for slaughter?’ my father asked. The eyes of the piglet were wet, grey things, beck stones, fringed around with thick white lashes.

‘Twenty-six weeks, it is, all told.’

‘How many do you get out of the Old Spots, about?’

‘Nine or ten or so each time,’ replied the farmer, warming to his theme. ‘Though we had one, when was it, October, had sixteen. Wasn’t it?’ His wife, beaming, nodded. ‘Aye. Sixteen,’ he said, with something like pride, ‘and she raised them all. All of them.’

‘Good grief,’ said my dad.

There was a pause.

‘When I used to work the farm, we had a sow with a litter of fifteen,’ he added. ‘But they all died. Rolled on them, she did.’

I spoke. ‘On purpose?’

‘No, no.’ He shook his large head, heavily. ‘She just rolled on them by accident.’

‘Sheep do it on purpose, sometimes,’ I said.

The younger son of the farm stood at the rear of the barn, boots deep in a pile of white feathers. In front of him hung a half-plucked turkey silhouetted in the gaslight. Beside him, a radio blared out a football match. His face was expressionless as his hands went about their task, fast and expert. I watched him, sidelong, under my lashes. He looked like an exact amalgamation of both his parents, his father’s almost comically red cheeks and his mother’s wide-set eyes under the oilskin cap. He looked up for a second and saw me watching him. I turned away quickly.

My father was in a small breeze-block room off to the side, counting out the meat we’d ordered.

‘Like I say,’ the woman was speaking, ‘we don’t normally go in for selling frozen but with sirloin it dun’t matter so much. And we couldn’t get the butcher to come out again before Christmas. Next time we’ll slaughter now…next March, it’ll be. We only get one or two of the Dexters done at a time, and there’s a woman over Clitheroe who orders every bit of brisket we get in. Every bit. It’s funny what folk like, isn’t it?’

She handed three packets of shrink-wrapped steak over to my father. Our name had been pencilled in rough capitals on the label. She shuffled to the side to close the chest freezer, her huge bottom bumping against me. ‘Sorry, love.’ Above us, the turkeys were hanging with bound feet from hooks nailed into the low beams. The one closest to me wasn’t long dead. The raw bloody wound in its neck gaped like a wet ruby.

‘You’ll be after one of these as well, then?’ said the farmer’s wife, groping for her calculator and nodding towards the hanging turkeys. My father looked at me, eyebrows raised. I flushed. ‘I dunno,’ I said. ‘I don’t think so.’

‘We could get one, I suppose,’ he said. ‘I hadn’t thought of it. Make sandwiches for Boxing Day.’

‘Good turkeys, they are,’ said the woman. ‘Reared outdoors. Though we’ve stuck ‘em in the back, now. Bit too rough for them out.’

I shifted uncomfortably. I didn’t want to be rude. I spoke quickly, as quietly as I could, desperate. ‘I…Dad…dw y ddy’mn hoffi…turkey,’ I finished, lamely.

‘What’s that?’ said the farmer, only half-listening.

‘Twrci’, said Dad. ‘You mean you don’t like twrci.’ Of course it was the same word.

‘Oh,’ said the woman. ‘Best not, then.’ But she didn’t seem to mind. She totted up the meat on the calculator, looking puzzled. ‘That isn’t…Sorry about that.’ She laughed. ‘I were out last night.’

‘Twenty-two pounds thirty, it should be,’ said the farmer. ‘Call it twenty-two.’ Dad unfolded the note from his wallet.

He patted his chest. ‘I don’t have any change on me.’

My father looked at me. ‘Do you have any money?’

‘I don’t,’ I said.

The boy who had been plucking the turkey had come over and stood in the doorway, waiting.

My father went out to the car to get some coins from the glove compartment. I stayed, looking at the pigs rootling purposefully. A small gap in the drystone had been plugged with a torn feedsack. The sow lay on her side, cotton flag ears flopping as her litter barged and clambered up her side. The smallest one was invisible under a torrent of heads bobbing with excitement and trotters struggling for purchase.

The farmer was beside me. ‘Good pigs,’ he said quietly.

‘They’re nice,’ I said.

‘Want one, do you?’ My father reappeared in the doorway. ‘Keep it in the garden!’ He laughed.

‘Some folk put a couple of them out in the orchards,’ said the woman, reappearing from around the corner, a bundle of twine in the crook of her great arm. ‘Put them out there to turn over the soil. Gets the air into it, specially this heavy clay we’ve got.’

‘The National Trust puts them out on the fells to root up the bracken,’ I said.

We went out of the barn and back out into the snow. The sky was dark pewter. My father shook hands with the farmer, and he and his wife went back to the caravan, knocking the snow and muck off their boots as they climbed the rickety steps. The son still stood in the doorway. As we were climbing into the car he called after us.

‘Don’t take the road by Forden’s,’ he said. ‘I got stuck there two hours ago when I was bringing the sheep up. It’s frozen half-way up the bank and skidding underfoot. Stick to Syke Lane and you should be right, it’s had the sun on it.’

As we turned out of the farm track and back to the road, the thunderheads of the next raft of storms coming from the west glowed in the last rays of the cold sun as it fell behind. My father whistled over the din of the engine as the car rumbled its slow and attentive way over the iced curves and hidden dips of the thin road. Outside in the quietness, there was the long, slow light over the winter grass, and the rustle and jump of small birds in the hedgerows.

‘I hope the pigs do well,’ I said. My father said nothing.

We reached home under a sky of ink and gold. To the east the first faint stars appeared, cold dots between the smurred edges of the clouds.

The light was on in the kitchen and steam had fogged up half the glass. Someone was boiling vegetables for tea; the smell of soggy carrot nosed into us, warm and wet, as we shook the snow and muck off our boots.

‘Shut the door!’ yelled my mother from the sitting room.

My brother is in the kitchen.

‘Well, then,’ says Dad affably, slapping his hands down onto the thick wooden table. He has already stored the slabs of beef carefully in the garage freezer, out of the way for the next week. ‘What have you been doing with yourself?’

Rhys shrugs. ‘Nothing.’ He is sat at the kitchen table, eating a slice of bread and cheese. He is not using a plate. There are crumbs all over the table top. My father tuts as he wipes them up with a dishcloth.

‘It’s only half an hour until your tea, you know.’

‘It’s fine,’ says my brother, annoyed. He goes back to munching on his sandwich.

 

I think of the piglet, its eyes winking like sequins in the half-dark of the barn.

 

‘You won’t eat your dinner,’ says my father. He turns around and starts investigating the contents of the sideboard.

 

My brother mutters something unintelligible and turns over the page of the newspaper he has been reading. His finger leaves a greasy, buttery mark on the side. My father half turns.

‘Eh? I can’t hear you if you mumble like that.’

‘I wasn’t,’ spat my brother with derision, ‘mumbling.’

 

‘You were that,’ said my father, cheerfully. ‘You’re turning into a mumbler, you are. You were doing it all last week too.’ Rhys looked up from the sports page, glowering from between his curtain of hair. I can feel the corners of my mouth twitching, curling upwards.

My father doesn’t notice a thing, banging about in the cupboard for a saucepan. ‘You mumbled that whole thing.’ He turned to me, unwisely, for conformation. ‘He did, didn’t he? What did you say?’ I looked away. Rhys was still staring at him, irritation screwed all over his features. ‘I didn’t bloody mumble, all right?’

‘Well, I didn’t hear you. I didn’t catch a word.’ My father is oblivious, teasing. ‘Mumbler.’ 

My brother jumped down. His face was bright red with vexation. ‘I SAID, DW Y’N WEDI BLINO. DW Y’N MYND YR GWELY,’ he yelled. And he knocked the newspaper off the table and onto the floor, and stamped off up the stairs

My father roared.

‘That’s my boy!’ he said.

Elaine

She stands with her back to the room, leaning against the edge of the draining board as she rubs a damp towel over the dishes, still warm and rimmed with suds. The dog, Pippin, looks up from his basket in the corner, holds the pose for a moment, and then settles back into the long torpor of mid-afternoon. Outside, the river lies slack as soup beyond the fences and the dustbins and the tarmac that separate it from the neat, drab row of flats where she has lived for thirteen years come December.

She is a lady just beyond middle age; thoroughly unremarkable. Today, she has on a pink jumper and beige trousers that brush the tops of her small feet in their wool-lined slippers. One hand reaches up to adjust her hair as the other deals carefully with the cutlery as she slides each piece into the allotted drawer. A row of potted plants sit upon the kitchen windowsill, cheerful begonias, a tub of basil for cooking.  She watches from the window. She looks at the clock; it is nearly half-past four. She is waiting.

It had been a cold Sunday afternoon when she had first seen him. It was around four o’clock and the light was already draining from the dull sky when she buttoned herself into her coat and briskly clipped on Pippin’s lead The dog had not wanted to leave the placid warmth of the kitchen with its humming array of white goods and he stood rooted in stolid and silent protest before she tugged him out of the door and across the cul-de-sac to where the back of the houses joined the towpath. They took the usual route up towards the iron bridge and the new housing development that crouched shamefaced on the fringes of established, worn-in streets with their window boxes and comfy front gardens, stopping before they reached the fence that separated the last tentative fingers of the town from the flat, empty marshes beyond.

As always, Pippin trotted busily a few paces behind, sniffing primly at the corners of brick walls and black-and-white street signs, fumbling with tail-wagging eagerness at a rustling clump of long grass. The sagging bellies of the clouds drifted low over the bare trees on the other side of the river.  As she looked up a bank of swans came in, low and stark white against the dirty sky. Turning against a sudden gust of air, they made their skidding, stuttering landing on the water, rousing a flurry of barks from the dog. The swans spaced their origami shapes across the water and then began to drift silently downstream, imperious, masts of necks to the wind. Elaine watched them as they turned the bend, catching the stream at its centre. Then, calling to the dog, she turned for home. She was relieved to be heading back. The cold - that creeping freeze so peculiar to East Anglia that seeps up through the soil and takes root in the bone was spreading through her, filament by filament. Her fingers were red as she grasped the leash and moved with a beetlish scurry along the towpath.

The river is a fast one, narrow and angular, shallow for the most part but with unsuspecting channels where the force of the stream carves its way, made visible only by a slight tautening where the muscles of the water clench under the surface.

Yellow leaves twirled giddy on the skin; drab ducks tutted from sparse bunches of reeds at the river’s edge.  The banks were lined with barges, moored up by the old bridge and opening out by the jetty where a large and nondescript pub, barricaded all about with picnic benches, stood amid solitary broad-eaved houses draped in funeral wreaths of willow.

Further along the path were the small balconied boathouses of the colleges with their bright little insignias painted over the big rolling doors. Elaine noted the rowers as they waited for their outings, bundled up against the cold in leggings and coloured jackets and their cheeks chafed red in the raw wind that ruffled the dropping curtains of the bankside trees. There were groups of them clustered down by the launches, tall clean-faced girls with muscular thighs, square-shouldered boys jogging on the spot and the coach on his bicycle and the megaphone tucked under his arm. The cox stood, arms folded, a foot tucked through the metal rigger of the long eight-shell to stop the current from tugging it away as the rowers fetched their oars. They pulled them off the racks at the side of the boathouse and laid them, painted blades uppermost, by the river’s edge while they stretched and jumped and swigged from bottles of water.

Elaine wasn’t much interested in the rowing, though she always tuned into the boat race, every year - feet up, cup of tea in hand. She felt it her civic duty, in the same way that she tuned in to the carols from Kings each and every Christmas Eve despite having no religious sentiment beyond a vague, Sunday-schoolish adhesion to the principles of good clean fingernails and being pleasant to people in supermarkets. Her God came flavoured with the tang of orange squash and paper-doilied biscuits. She liked the carols, though, the trembling face of the soloist almost beheaded by his ruff like John the Baptist presented to the awaiting audience, and the absolute hush of indrawn breath before the first note flew clear as glass into the candlelit air. It was nice, the tradition of it. Her father had always made sure to watch the boat race too, studying the past form, staunch in his Fenland loyalties.

Today, as she passed the rowers she noticed them only to remark internally that they were going to give themselves colds going out onto the water like that. Pippin trotted ahead, interest piqued by some invisible beast in the turfs and ruts of grass, and she followed.

Soon, they were back, turning the plastic handle of the door and stepping back into the bulb-lit warmth of the kitchen. Good. Pippin skittered happily across the floor and began nosing into his bowl. Elaine removed her outdoor boots, and went over to the sink to wash her hands before cutting up the vegetables for dinner. She laid freshly-scrubbed potatoes and carrots out on a clean piece of newspaper and began to peel them, gathering a faint satisfaction from the scraping away of the roughened, cracked skins to the clean, crunching wet flesh beneath.

That was when the boy had first appeared. He was on the other side of the slatted fence that separated Elaine’s square of garden from the tarmac where the other residents parked. He was pushing a bicycle, hurriedly; his gaze scouting this way and that, searching out something. His hair was long curls, dark brown threaded with copper where the sun had burned flashes of red into it. His olive skin was sallow in the late autumn light. He approached the fence and began to chain up his bike, winding a lock through the gap between the boards and clipping it into place. Irritation surged through the woman in the kitchen. She put down the peeler and tapped on the window angrily but he did not hear. He was preoccupied with the fiddling lock. He stood up, adjusted his earphones, and set off at a lope in the direction of the boathouses.

Oh now, said Elaine, really.

It wasn’t on, she thought. Inconsiderate. She wasn’t one to make a fuss but it was private property and they were always leaving their bikes all over everywhere, the students. She remembered her daily bus journey to work, the sharp-breathed ire of the bus drivers as they ducked and whizzed past on their bikes, coming within a hair’s breadth of disaster, it seemed. And there were so many of them, flotillas of bicycles by the station, ranks and shoals of them taking up space on the pavement, being pushed carelessly side-by-side down narrow streets by gossiping young girls. And now this, chained to her own fence and no doubt scratching it. She had been going to weatherproof it over the summer but the time had got away from her. In the corner, Pippin yawned.

She might say something, she thought, when he came back. Tell him to do what everyone else did and find a proper space for it. In the end, though, there was dinner to make, and a good property program on the telly and she settled down on the sofa. It hadn’t been a bad sort of day.

The next day, though, he came again. He was less furtive this time as he slipped the springy lock through the slats of her fence and clicked it into place. She was upstairs this time changing the sheets and saw him from above as he came along behind the thin row of trees. She ran downstairs - her slippers skidding a little on the thin stair carpet - but by the time she had reached the back door he was already gone. She opened the door and stepped out into the bright chill. The dog half-raised his head, expectant, but she was too distracted to notice. She opened the latch of the fence and walked through to the other side. There it was, the boy’s bike, red and splashed all over with encrusted mud. There was a scuffed numbered sticker on the side. The handlebars scraped carelessly against the bare wood. It didn’t seem to have done any damage, thought Elaine - not yet, at any rate. She was irritated nonetheless at the thoughtlessness with which the boy had just dumped his bike outside her house. It was her house. He could hardly have failed to notice that it was there. How easily, she thought, people rode roughshod over one another these days. Only last week she had been walking through town and a couple had pushed past her knocking her bag from her shoulder. The woman half-turned to look at her but did not apologise; they swept on, holding hands as they strode like barges butting broad-shouldered up the street. She stared after, righteously indignant, but no-one caught her eye. This was normal, she supposed. People didn’t think, or they didn’t care. And now, there was this bike.

She looked it over carefully. She could leave a note, she thought, polite but firm; tuck it in between the spokes. But then again, that might seem a bit unfriendly. Small-minded. Her husband Arthur had always expressed a marked disdain for petty behaviour. He had been a short man, and voluble. A man with Opinions, thumped out with the base of a pint glass on the bar of the Bookbinder’s Arms, red-faced, with his horse’s laugh and his pot belly pressing against his shirts. I can’t stand stinginess, he said. And do you know it’s a kind of stinginess of the mind, it is, being petty. A neighbour, asking for the return of a loaned item. Elaine herself, for wondering aloud why it was that it was her that always paid for the food shopping. Petty it was, not to share. To give a bit. Live and let live, eh? Or else, if you were the kind of person that counted things like that to be important, then what were you? A skinflint. And he would raise his eyebrows, tapping the side of his head with a smirk. Elaine’s family – her parents had owned a butcher’s shop in Hitchin -  were included in this sweep. Parochial, he called them. Hicks. Didn’t understand the modern world and were too stupid to try. Your mother, he would say, with a short laugh of contempt. Remember that year we tried to have chicken instead of turkey for Christmas? You’d have thought we’d invited a bloody stripper to serve up, the way she looked at it. Always the first in the pub to buy a round, loudly, for other people’s wives and friends, he had left Elaine one drab March weekend for a woman he had met at his job. He had disappeared for two days before he came to tell her. He left the car running outside. That had been seventeen years ago. Three years ago, he had died of an aneurysm. A cousin in Chichester had sent a card. She had seen the notice in the papers. So that was where he had ended up, she supposed.

She kept her wedding dress hanging in the empty half of the fitted wardrobe in her bedroom in a sheath of drycleaner’s plastic. The long lace hem hovered just above the tops of her walking boots, an old, mothballed ghost of no use or ornament that she couldn’t quite bring herself to throw away.

She decided that she wouldn’t leave a note, not yet. If she saw him she would ask politely that he not leave his bike just there, because it was private property, but then again, perhaps he wouldn’t do it again anyway. Having settled the matter in her mind, she returned to the house.

The next day was a Thursday and Elaine was out to do the weekly food shop. Leaving a disappointed Pippin slumped in his basket ruefully chewing on a plastic bone she set out in the direction of town, bundled up firmly against the cold. As she crossed the iron footbridge over the river, the sky opened up before her. The open ground between the river and the main road was crisscrossed with sandy pathways where cyclists sped, people walked, dogs ran.

It was a bright day and some young boys were trying to launch a kite into the air, one holding the reel and shouting directions as the other raced, tossing the rhombus of fabric optimistically upwards, trying to hook it onto the faint winds that whickered over the field. A weak yellowish sun cast their shadows, sharp and perfect as a daguerrotype over the grass.

Elaine tucked her hands into her pockets and headed towards the supermarket. As she approached the narrow gate at the corner of the green she could make out a cyclist coming towards her, indistinct against the light. She stepped to one side to let him pass over the cattle grid. With a small lurch of surprise, she saw that it was him, the boy with the red bicycle. She looked into his face. He smiled back at her, a frank, open grin. ‘Thanks’, he said.

Elaine was perturbed. How strange, she thought. He couldn’t have recognized her. He had never seen her. She walked on without noticing she was moving, absorbing the moment. His eyes had been green, she saw, a startlingly feline shade. She had been silly to be annoyed, really. People weren’t so bad after all. She smiled to herself as she walked to the shop, feeling a little bubble of lightness somewhere between her ribs. When she got home, there was the bike again, against the fence.

Slowly, and by degrees, she began to wonder about the boy. At first, it was just something to think about as she tidied the house or shopped made her meals or watched the television in the evenings. Idle thoughts that sifted through the layers of the mind, like remembered music or the half-notion of writing a postcard to a friend. Somebody to ponder, like a new colleague or neighbour. Elaine hadn’t ever had many friends – there had been a couple of girlfriends at school, Anne and Susan, and then at nineteen she had married Arthur and that had sort of been enough. They had had friends, as a couple – people who invited them to dinners where they drank sherry and ate beef casserole and talked about nothing very much – but then afterwards, they had drifted away, awkward. She had always got on well with her colleagues at the bank. They would chat together, ask about plans for the weekend, eat biscuits on their breaks. Then when she retired she realised that there wasn’t really anybody she could go out to tea with or even just invite for a walk. That was when she got Pippin.

The whole of the following week, he came almost every day. It was usually between four and five o’clock in the afternoon when he appeared on the other side of the fence. She decided that if he were ever to look up she would wave, but he never did. At any rate, she supposed, the double-glazing would have only thrown his own reflection back at him. She noticed that sometimes he wore a cycle helmet and sometimes not, that sometimes he tied his hair back, bunching his thick curls at the nape of his neck.

The weeks that followed were undifferentiated but for the darkening turn in the weather that made Pippin’s walks short, bracing affairs, confined largely to the towpath. There were sensible reasons for this, but she also noticed that she began to look more carefully at the rowers in the boats that passed her while she was on her outings. The shrinking portion of daylight meant that more and more of them were on the river at once and there were frequent confrontations, with the blades of passing boats clattered roughly against each other while the coxes swore and struggled with the rudder and the coaches barely maintained their veneer of mutual politeness. The bargemen, too, cursed volubly from the decks when a misjudged stroke scraped against the side of their houseboats, scuffing a clumsy morse code along the tarred wood below the waterline. Sometimes she took with her a thermos of sweet tea and would sit in the late autumn sun and watch them pass.

Under this new scrutiny the boats were longer than she had thought; they came in different sizes – two seats, four and eight. The coxes sat hunched in the back with lifejackets and little headsets, speaking in a crackling language she could not make out, like the cries of the ducks on the river. The novices wobbled, missing their strokes, leaning on their oars and making the narrow boat flop from side to side like a drunken swan, bringing out a patient sing-song call of ‘easy there’ as the cox pulled them to a halt time and again. She sipped at her brew, content to spot the boats as they negotiated the tricky bends, marveling a little at the power of the better crews as they glided past balanced to a fault, faces set forward like so many well-trained hounds, almost quivering as they leant forward and dug the oars into the water, waiting, waiting, before the cox loosed them like an arrow from the bow. They skimmed over the river with astonishing speed, the thunk of their seats hitting the back of the slide in perfect unison as the oars shot over the water. The sullen river water flashed, caught on the blades as they snapped out and turned flat to skim above the surface, and then dipped again. The oars left pooling ripples behind them that bent in on themselves, small, sucking vortices on the oilish surface. Twice she thought she saw him but both times on closer inspection she was mistaken. Yet the bike continued to be chained to her fence several times a week, early morning and late afternoon.

She thought about the sort of life the boy might have. She had never taken much interest in that other, parallel city-within-a- city. She knew they still wore gowns but they weren’t all rich, not anymore. Someone she knew at the bank had once worked as an administrator there and another one of the tellers had been a student. She rarely went into the town after dark but sometimes, taking the dog for an evening stroll, she’d see groups of them, laughing and shouting down the narrow lanes, clustered around the doorways of pubs or the lamplit doorways of the colleges, or queuing outside the kebab vans in Market Square, with their striped scarves and untidy haircuts. She supposed he had plenty of friends, and ate his dinner on long oak tables in candlelit halls surrounded by smoky oil portraits of eminent old men. She scooped some dried biscuits out of a bag for Pippin. Alexander, she thought. He would be named Alexander. Or Stephen or Michael – they would do – but probably Alexander. Those green half-moon eyes. Maybe even a touch foreign, with that skin. He would be studying something clever. Science. He would wear a white lab coat and go to lectures on his bicycle. As she took her walks by the river, she began to notice small differences in the colours of the oars and the jackets the rowers wore, and what they meant. Green meant the boat was from Jesus College, deep blue for Trinity, pink for Corpus Christi. Sometimes, she wandered late into the dying hours of the day, watching the stain of the setting sun like mercury over the water working its slow, alchemical spell. Along the borders of the water, the pollarded willows raised their brutal amputated stumps, sprouting skinny fireworks of twigs into a sky the colour of bone.

At night, in the bed beside the beige-curtained window, the silver scent of the water pulled at the edges of her dreams. Brown, heavy fish spooled and hung in hidden channels and deep pools under bridges, still as stonecarvings. Moorhens bobbed across the surface, ran splay-footed over duckweed-coated ditches, sending up shrill and lonely notes in the darkness.  A cold moon rose, white as appleflesh above the fens. Far above, the winter stars tilted, and sharpened their swords.

It was a couple of weeks later that it happened. Countdown was over and it wasn’t yet time for the news, so it just happened to be that she was loitering in the corner of the kitchen that afforded the best view of the cul-de-sac. She was browning chicken quarters for the stockpot she saw him approach. Her heart flinched like an oyster; there was a feeling of sickness. She continued her cookery just as before but her gestures had become artificial, a performance of perfect domesticity enacted over the chopping-board. She sneaked a glance up under her eyelashes. He was there. A wild, fierce thrill ran through her. Perhaps this would be the afternoon that he would glance up and see her through the window; she could wave to him, and he would wave back and smile again.

She looked up. He was half-bent over, unlocking the bike from the fence, but today it was taking him a long time to work the clicking mechanism of the lock. He glanced towards her. She knew in that second that there was something wrong, something off in the way he looked straight ahead of him, seeing but not seeing. She stared openly, now, her fear of discovery forgotten. He reached out an arm and grasped the top edge of the fence, steadying himself. She saw him blink, lick his lips, twice, open his mouth as if to say something. Then he fell.

Before she could think she was outside, pulling open the bolt on the gate and then she was at his side. He had half-fallen on the pavement; he was on his hands and knees as she watched but he hauled himself groggily to his feet, seemingly with great difficulty. He seemed not to have noticed her. He raised the side of his hand to his head, and let out a sort of sigh. Out of pure instinct, she grabbed his arm as he stumbled heavily, almost dragging her with him as he fell. Oh, no, no, sorry, he said, in a quiet voice. His hands were shaking. She noticed for the first time the silver bracelet around his wrist.She helped him into a sitting position, half-cradling him as she knelt behind him on the road, her legs crooked awkwardly to the side. He was weak and heavy against her. Moved by some guiding instinct, or protocol snatched from television, she reached her fingers under his jaw to find the carotid artery. She felt the quickening pulse under her fingers, warm beneath the cords of his neck. He moved. He spoke to her.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said, uselessly. He spoke like a sleepwalker. ‘I feel very bad. I think –‘

There was no time to believe it, to take in the strangeness of it all. She spoke; her voice was dry. She told him it would be all right. She asked what was the matter.

‘I’m diabetic.’ He closed his eyes. ‘I think I should have.’ He was blinking again, rapid and agitated. He struggled to sit.

‘Do you need sugar?’ she asked, desperate. She knew this was urgent. ‘Or insulin? Do you take insulin? Do you have it?’

He spoke in a dry rush, as if he were about to be sick. ‘- I need – I should have – some Coke. Or chocolate or something. An orange. Something. I’m sorry.’

‘OK love, OK. Can you stand? Could you stand up for me?’

‘Yes, I think.’ He leant forward, and pushing his hands against the floor, raised himself up again. He looked at her, through her. She stood, and took his arm, gently.

‘Come now, quickly now. This is my house. I’ll get you something, it’s alright, it’ll be alright, OK?’

She began to lead him firmly to the door. He followed, stumbling slightly. She brought him into the kitchen, grabbing at the kitchen table for support. Pippin started up, baring his tiny teeth and barking a sharp staccato alarm. She shushed him, sharply. She led the boy into the sitting room and told him to sit on the sofa. She dashed through into the kitchen, her mind racing. What did she have, what could she give him? She never kept fizzy drinks in the house. Chocolate? Somewhere. Hot chocolate…but then you had to make it up, boil the kettle and then wait for it to cool.  The dog continued to stand, hairs on end, a frozen statue of attention staring at the intruder as Elaine threw open cupboard doors, pushed jars and packets to the side. She found the cocoa powder and spooned five small molehills into a mug. She added sugar, pouring straight from the packet, and some milk. She stirred it, frantic but focused. She took the mug through into the sitting room and pushed it into his hands. The boy was breathing deeply, eyes closed. He opened his eyes, waited a moment, trying to form sense, then took a drink.

She stood over him, terribly anxious. She didn’t know what to do, who to call. Perhaps the ambulance. She should call the ambulance, or a doctor at least.

‘How is it? How are you feeling?’

It was very important.

‘It’s alright, it’s not so bad.’ He was grey and a sheen of sweat slicked his forehead.

‘What’s your name?’ she asked, timidly.

‘Nicholas,’ he said. ‘Nick.’

He drank the mug. He was shaking, still, and he sat on the edge of the sofa cushions staring fixedly ahead. She could tell that he was frightened. ‘You’ve had a shock, haven’t you?’ she said, gently. The dog stood in the doorway, bristling, unsure.

He said nothing. Some seconds passed. She waited.

‘Do you need me to call an ambulance?’

‘No. Thank you, no. I’ll be OK, I think. I just need – a bit of time to get my head together, I think. Thank you.’

‘Do you need some more? I can get you an orange, if you want.’

He spoke weakly, hardly louder than a whisper. ‘I don’t know at the moment. I should wait, I think.’

She was desperate to be useful, to help, but didn’t see what she could do. Suddenly she remembered the bike, left lying on the pavement. She went outside to fetch it. It lay, front wheel rearing at a crazy angle, handlebars to the sky like a broken insect, a metal zigzag on the black tarmac. She picked it up, wondering at its weight, and wheeled it to the fence. He had left the keys in the lock and she attempted to prop it up and rechain it to the wooden slat but her hands were all thumbs. Adrenalin fizzed through her blood, blotting time. The world was hovering in different pieces around her; the usual relations between objects had been all broken open. Things hung, suspended, animate. Her house sprang into strangeness as a cluster of coloured angles, blocks of orange and lines of white. He was there. He was inside. The bike would have to take its chances without the lock, for now.

She stood up, and a sense of the drama broke over her. Good God, she said to herself, how lucky I was watching. What if he had fallen, and no-one had seen? He could have got much worse, if I hadn’t seen him. What if he’d fallen on the path, and gone into the river?  It didn’t bear thinking about. I must be his guardian angel, she thought. She allowed herself a moment of glee, cuddling the thought to her chest. She could hardly believe it – he was there, in her sitting room right this second. She had to see it for herself, to make sure She went back inside and there he was, still sitting on the sofa. He wasn’t shivering any more.

‘I was just taking care of your bike, she explained. ‘How do you feel?’

‘Getting better, I think. Jesus.’ He ran his hand over his hair, rubbed at his forearm where he had fallen. ‘What an idiot. Sorry.’

‘Oh, don’t worry about it, not at all,’ she said. ‘What happened? If you can remember, I mean.’

‘Didn’t get a proper lunch, basically,’ he said. ‘Then we had a ten-k erg, and I pushed it too far. All my fault,’ he said, wanly. ‘I don’t usually mess it up. Must have miscalculated.’

She was overwhelmed with pity. ‘You poor thing,’ she said. ‘You sure you wouldn’t like me to call anyone? A friend, maybe?’

He smiled, abashed. ‘No, honestly, it’s fine. I’ll be all right in a minute. I’ll get out of your hair soon, I’m sorry.’

His voice was not quite what she had expected, she thought, but then realised that she hadn’t expected anything in particular. He spoke quietly, with no trace of an accent. There was something musical in his intonation: a woodwind sound, a faint and gentle pattern. His curls brushed the back of the sofa. She wanted to know more.

‘Does this happen to you very often?’ It was an asinine question, particularly as he had already given an answer ‘I hope not,’ she said, waving her hands. ‘It doesn’t look like it’s very much fun.’ She felt silly, breathless. He looked into her eyes, and smiled.

‘No,’ he said, kindly. ‘My maths is pretty rough, but I’ve had it all my life, so…’

‘You’re a student, then?’ It was an interruption, which she knew was rude, but she wanted to know as much as she could. She wanted to know everything.

He nodded. ‘Yeah. Just in my final year now.’ He took a last swig of the cold milk chocolate, and laid it aside.

‘Oh,’ she nodded, ‘that’s nice.’ She trailed off into silence. She felt a sudden, hot shame of her lack of conversation; out of practice, she had lapsed those skills and when they were needed now found them wanting. She had never been a big reader, at any rate. There were few books in the house; a leatherbound set of the complete works of Shakespeare, bought for decoration, a couple of atlases and a cookery manual, a copy of Tennyson’s poetry and some paperbacks she’d picked up from a charity shop for holidays. ‘You’ll be off to be a teacher after that, I suppose,’ she finished, lamely. He didn’t know, he said politely. Wasn’t sure yet.

She spoke quickly, before an impossible awkwardness rose between them. She tried to give the impression that she was accustomed to this role of hostess and nurse. ‘Would you like some more of that chocolate? Or I could make you some sweet tea?’ She stood over him in an attitude of concern. She knew best. ‘That’s what you should have, really, if you’ve had a shock. Or some water?’

‘A glass of water would be really good, actually.’

‘Right-o,’ she said cheerily. ‘I won’t be a moment.’

She was fluttering as she re-entered the kitchen. She hummed a song under her breath. As she reached into the cupboard for a clean glass she felt as if she could have danced, right there on the linoleum. She was useful again. She was warming to the theme of the ministering angel, and decided that hospitality ought really to be extended beyond the a mere glass of water. She fished out a plate and popped a couple of slices of bread in the toaster. Good wholesome stuff, brown toast with butter on it. And an orange too, just in case. She half-drifted into a reverie while the toast browned, a silly schoolgirl’s dream curtailed by the matter-of-fact click of the timer switch. Pippin stood behind her ankles, expectant, but she was wholly elsewhere.

When she returned to the sitting room she saw that he was leant against the back of the sofa, his head lolled to one side and his eyes fallen shut. She nearly dropped the plate. He must have heard her gasp of shock, because he started awake, embarrassed. ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘I’m fine – I was just – I’m just really sleepy. That’s what happens, after I go down like that. It’s normal. Sorry to have scared you.’

                                                                                     

‘No, no, it’s fine. I don’t mind.’ There was a peculiar tightness in her voice. ‘I made you some toast.’

‘Thanks.’

He was still a little green about the gills. He was so serious, she thought, so fine a quality of seriousness he had in him. His lashes were remarkable; dark gold and flared like flower petals.

‘You know, I think you should probably have a lie down. It’s no trouble, really it isn’t.’ He looked at her, questioning; she was quite astonished at her own daring.

‘You’re not well yet, and I wouldn’t feel right in myself letting you go until you are.’ She smiled, comfortingly. ‘You’ll need a proper rest before you ride home, it isn’t safe getting on a bike after that, and with the weather and all…’ She was gabbling, she knew, but she could see that he was tempted through sheer bodily weariness to give in, in spite of the awkwardness and oddity of the situation. Insistent, she pressed home the point.

‘It’s no trouble. Really it isn’t. And I will worry if I send you out after that, you know.’

‘It’s very kind, but – ‘

‘Oh, no. Anyone would do the same.’

The veneer of resolve shuddered, then broke. He smiled, a real smile.

‘If it’s really no trouble, I mean – thanks, thank you so much.’

‘Absolutely not. Absolutely not. Wait there.’

She climbed the stairs to her bedroom and heaped the pillow and duvet from her own bed into her arms. She bore them downstairs and pushed open the sitting-room door; it had a habit of catching on the thick pile of the carpet and becoming stuck.

‘- Here’

The boy smiled at her, took another sip from the glass of water. ‘Thanks,’ he said again. ‘I’ll be all right.’ He had taken off his trainers and set them neatly under the coffee table.

‘I’ll leave you to it,’ she said. ‘I’ll be in the kitchen if you need anything, OK?’

‘Yeah. Thanks. This is so weird, but thanks.’ He pulled his legs up onto the settee, took the pillow and placed it, with the air of one handling a foreign object, onto the arm. He gave it a pat, adjusting the position, then tucked his own arm underneath it. She hovered at the door of the room; he was already halfway to unconsciousness,

‘My mum would thank you,’ he said.

Elaine had never had a child. She had not wanted one with any firmity of purpose; she supposed that she had never been quite sure where she stood on the matter, which she suspected wasn’t really good enough. She had never felt herself to be deficient in her lack of offspring, nor understood the tidal urge that drew some women towards infants in the park, in the supermarket, cooing and prodding with rapt fascination over a sticky-chinned ball of dough with goggly eyes. At any rate Arthur and her - they’d talked about it, but it had never happened, and that was that. They seemed from her brief quota of insight into the messy, fleshly, neurotic universe of motherhood to be primarily a source of grief and anxiety, of weariness and fret from everything from chickenpox to school reports to getting in with the wrong crowd and coming home late and pregnant. Just another thing to worry about. Now, as she watched the boy asleep, she felt as if she might have too late understood. She had wrestled with herself, sat at the kitchen table, slippers tapping unthinking against the floor, half-biting her lip as she clutched a forgotten cup of tea. She had fought and her better judgement had at last thrown up its hands in defeat and permitted her to nudge the door open just a chink, heart in her mouth and breath clamped firm and tight within her chest, praying she wouldn’t disturb him, he wouldn’t wake. She was entranced.

He lay, perfect, in the rosy light. The still point of the turning world. The silence in the room absolute but for the slow, soughing noise of his breathing. She did not approach, but in the few inches of space between the doorframe and the wood, she traced the lines of his face, marmoreal, inviolate. Her eyes, reverent, slid over his body, the plane of his uppermost cheekbone, his hairline, the hollow of his neck, his blunt fingernails, wide forehead, the whorl of his ear, his arched eyebrow, his deep-scored feltrum and slightly protuberant white teeth. He was impossibly beautiful.

Elaine felt as if she were cast out of herself, suspended in a universal tenderness.

She was part of the aureate glow that surrounded the sleeping youth, walled in by the silence and the slow metronome of his breath. There was a spell that stood guard over him, burnishing his skin and the waxed leaves of the rubber plant, casting little stars from the half-full glass of water that lay on the table beside him. He looked almost mythic on her hire-purchase sofa, a young god newly cast from the mould, kinetic, full of unawakened being. Outside, at a great distance, rain fell; it was dark now and the rain fell in fits and squalls that fused out, weakly, against the shield of strong forces fallen over the house. She and the boy were protected, called out of time in the charmed circle of the lamplight. They were a world enclosed in glass together.

Hours passed, chartless and unheeded.

Elaine was sat at the breakfast table in the kitchen; she must have slept or at least passed out of active thought at some point because awareness curled its grey fingers through the slats in the blinds in the kitchen and she was suddenly there, awake. She sensed that it was some time later and that something had shifted, a disturbance just out of the edge of hearing, an invisible vibration in the air like the striking of a distant clock. Consciousness and the world had returned to foot their claim. She half-stood, almost involuntarily, palms flat against the wood of the table. She had been eating toast and the crumbs were scattered over the surface.

In the sitting room the boy Nick turned slightly, shifted to one side and then woke with a jolt at his unfamiliar surroundings. He sat up, heavily, as the world rearranged itself and settled down into some kind of sense. He sat there for some minutes, disorientated and shambolic, calming himself. He breathed out, heavily, shaking his head a little. Close one. He looked at his watch and was shocked to see that six hours had passed; it was nearly ten o’clock. Time to get going. He put on his trainers and stood up. He folded up the woman’s duvet. The pillow had become squashed into the corner of the sofa; he shook it out and set it down neat in the centre.

The woman was stood at her kitchen table, looking towards him as he came in. He felt guilty, somehow; he thought to himself that he should remember to send her a card or some chocolates, just to say thanks for sorting him out. ‘Hi,’ he said, abashed. ‘I’ve been taking up your sofa.’

She asked him if he’d slept well. He said that he had; apologized for having been asleep so long.

‘It’s no bother,’ she said. They were stood either side of the kitchen table. He had his backpack half-hoisted onto one shoulder. He did up the zipper on his jacket.

‘God, I can’t believe it got so late.’ He smiled. ‘You’ve been very kind.’

The woman seemed a little confused. Though that was natural, he supposed. The whole situation was hardly what you’d call an everyday occurrence. She looked at the clock on the wall. ‘It’s ten,’ she said.

‘I know.’ He coughed, to cover his discomfort. He sensed he was on the back foot somehow. The boy was prone to overanalysis, he knew, but still there was a faint air of unease. Somewhere in the room there was the obscure and unarticulated sense that he had broken some compact. Was he ungrateful? No, he was grateful, very much so.

‘I’d better get going,’ he said.

Elaine stood up. She had been fidgeting with the front of her jumper; it was pulled out of shape. The ceiling lights reflected off her glasses.

‘Are you sure you’re all right to go? Really?’

‘Oh, yep,’ he said, with certainty. ‘All fine and fixed now. Cheers.’ He gave a brief, polite smile.

She grabbed at the last sinking straw, earnest, desperate. ‘Stay. You can stay the night, if you want. It’s no trouble.’

‘I’m fine, really.’ He laughed, an attempt at breeziness.

‘I can make you some food? You – we -  could eat dinner?’

‘Oh – it’s – no. You’re too kind. I think it’s a bit late for dinner now, and besides which, they’ll be expecting me back. My housemates.’ He stepped towards the door.

‘They’ll be wondering where I’ve got to.’

The words seemed to come from somewhere else. Her voice was high, half-strangled. ‘You could call them. You could stay.’

Something opened in his eyes, then closed again.

‘No, I don’t think – thanks,’ he said. ‘I have to – be off. But thanks, really, thank you, for everything.’ He paused, but she said nothing. The woman was looking at him, just watching. He was more than a little unnerved. An image from last term’s module flashed unbidden into his head; Dido on the shores of Carthage. ‘Goodbye,’ he said, with a half-smile. He turned, closing the door behind him.

*

The boy returned to the house he shared in the small Victoria of wisteria and high  windows. The next day he went to college, to the library, to the bar. He didn’t tell anyone what had happened; it didn’t feel right, somehow. Back in the real world, his discomfort subsided. His overriding sensation was one of pity, tinted with obscure shame; pity for how badly things can turn out. He thought of the loneliness of the woman’s life, how desperate for human company she must be to try and keep a total stranger in her house. He felt a measure of pity too for himself. It had been horribly awkward, and he really only had himself to blame from start to finish. He knew that. By the end of the week, though, there was so much stuff to get through – two tutorials and an overdue essay his Eliot professor was snapping at his heels over as well as training – that thoughts of the incident were submerged, gradually, by the inching bustle of life.

*

She waited for the whole of the next day but he did not come. The day after that it was the same. The dog whined at the door for his walk but she didn’t really hear him. She prepared her breakfast, just the same. When it was finished she rinsed out the bowl and the spoon that she had used. She wiped them dry and replaced them in the cupboard.

Gradually, over a number of days, the normal routine reasserted itself. She got up, let Pippin out. She ate her meals. She watched the television. She took the dog for a walk. She went to the shop. She went to bed. She slept; her dreams were confused, corkscrewing images. A knight in armour falling from a tower. A child crying, lost, in a shopping centre. A sky with four suns, a frog in a hall of mirrors. She would wake in the night with a jolt and then the thoughts would return, clustering around her in a flock. She batted them away, fierce, but one by one they came back, sly and sneaking, settling over the branches of her mind. It would take her a long time to get back to sleep.

It had been weeks now and the boy had not come back. She waited for him, though she was no longer fully aware of what she was waiting for. Once or twice, hearing a noise on the other side of the fence, she started up from her settee and ran to the window but it was just somebody’s car starting up, somebody’s bin blown over. She went back into the living room. The carpet felt rough against her feet, thick and rough as raw wool.

Sometimes now she would catch herself speaking aloud - little snatches of thoughts, agreeing, questioning, disapproving, short starts of laughter bitten off with the realization that she was talking. She felt odd in the mornings, hollow in the head. The world was edged with felt. There was a small, smut-edged dent on the side of the fence where the bike had been. She reached out a finger, half-fearfully, and touched it. The wood was cold.

One day she looked around her living room that had been the same for twenty years, and stared at each piece of furniture with a questioning, sidelong scrutiny. That little brown table, where had it come from, and why was it there? She counted the row of books in the glass cabinet. Seven, ten, twelve, thirteen. She opened the cabinet and took out the books. She ran her hand over the slick, thin skin of the dustjackets one by one and replaced them. She found them difficult to look at; they seemed to evade her sight, to dodge sideways whenever she turned her full scrutiny upon them then hover half-solid on the periphery of her vision. They were too present, too visible. She pushed them to the back of the cabinet, where they sat, vibrating. She could hear them humming, like the motor of the fridge, faint but persistent through the walls.

Over the next few weeks, there came an incremental change in the nature of things.

One by one, the objects in her house began to disgust her. The sofa looked fat and squalid, an overstuffed, bloated thing, cuddling its own rolls and folds of flesh. Climbing the stairs, the banister under her hand had a greasy, grasping slickness. There was a sucking softness in the sheets of her bed that revolted her awake; she had to fight the beginnings of nausea when she accidentally brushed her hand against the leaves of the potted basil behind the kitchen sink. The still, cupboardish air of the house warmed to stagnancy in the lengthening hours of light but she would not open the windows because the smell of the river would come in, drifting, atom by atom, a low, insidious poison. The dog in the corner lay lethargic and silent. He rarely left the kitchen these days.

It was a Friday, and the weather had turned again. The streets shivered under the swollen bruises of clouds. Drifts of dull water slicked the pavements, collecting in worn places on uneven stones as the city hunched its shoulders against the rain. The forecast predicted no respite; it would be forty-eight hours of heavy precipitation on ground already saturated by a wetter-than-average month, and downstream from Thetford onwards the locks all along the Cam were thrown open to let the anticipated floodwaters through.  As the hours passed, the intensity of the rain rose steadily until the sky was full of water, a profligate downpour hammering blindly against the land.

In the centre the streets bloomed with a hundred snatched umbrellas, then emptied. Tourists dashed for cover under upturned coats. In the market square stallkeepers snatched in their goods. Stranded cyclists took shelter in doorways, staring out mutely into the storm. Behind the college walls, the surface of the river flickered and danced, bent and scarred out of smoothness. The underside of the bridge glowed with coloured lights, pale blue and violet.

On the other side of the river, Elaine left her house and locked the door behind her. The housing estate swam with rain. The edges of the pavements became running channels, dribbling and chattering with water choking the iron drains with flotsam; crisp packets and dead leaves rose up and swirled above their bulging throats, gasping and gargling on the run-off from acres of tarmac and concrete and the sodden woods beyond. She walked out of her gate, past the fence, across the pavement to the path by the river. The grass mulched sodden beneath her feet, half-submerged at the edges in puddles rising like mushrooms through the sod. She was soon soaked through; the thin lace of her dress clung heavy as sealskin to her body. She walked on, the hem trailing in the filth and wet. Now, the proper channels overwhelmed, drain runnings were forced gasping up through new cracks in the pavement as the water rose, helpless, swelling over the stones. There was some spattered shelter under the heavy trees, wet and thick with the smell of earth. Drops licked their way down the ivy leaves on their trunks, tumbling one after another. She turned her face a little upward to the sky and let them strike tiny blows against her eyelids, her cheek, invisible.

She moved out again away from the trees’ brief shelter, away, away to the quietness at the edge of the river. She did not really feel the cold – it was there, on some level, but placed on a high shelf out of immediate notice.

The riverbank was completely silent. Ripples stirred themselves against invisible obstacles beneath the water’s surface. There was a muted savagery to the river; it was not yet overfull but there was a new push to the current as if it were being squeezed by contractions through new-forced channels, a sense of those muscles clamouring for release.

For now, though, there was only the water, above and below and all around. Elaine stood in a strange echo-chamber of rain and river and land. She felt the sleeves of her dress. She was alone. The towpath was deserted. She was tired from the walk; she sat down on the bank to rest, utterly forgetful of the sodden ground. She thought she might as well. 

There was an old punt that was tethered against the bank half-hidden by a clump of sycamore trees. It had waited out the winter months for the first stir of tourists, forgotten or just neglected by its owners and in sore need of repair. There was no pole, but the paddle remained stowed firmly in the bottom of the boat. It was tied with a scrappy length of rope to an iron ring wedged in the concrete of the bank and it took a few minutes’ painful chafing of her palms and fingers grubbing with the rough plastic fibres before they grizzled and separated. She stood up and looked around. All she could hear was the quietness of water in her ears and the soft knock of the rotten wood of the punt against the bank. Fat, thick coins of rain fell, oblivious, patting against her uncovered head, sticking her hair to her cheek. She reached down and lifted the hem of her dress which was now black with mud, holding it daintily away from her as she stepped inside. The punt wobbled dangerously. There was a slew of dirty rainwater and fallen leaves sloshing about the bottom. It was hard to balance; there was a moment, a stomach-sickening lurch when her foot slipped an inch and she thought she might tumble but then she was in, safe.

She sat for a moment, rearranging herself, smoothing down the lines of the skirt. The thin white scent of the lilies she carried rose into the air. She was careful to keep the powdering orange stamens at a distance from the ivory lace drawn too tight across her stomach. You couldn’t be too careful with lilies. A voice, a memory came trailing after her, snagging at the edge of her mind. The sky above was white, white and breaking at the edges. She loosened the rope, pulling it through the ring until one end hung in the water. Keeping the bouquet clutched tightly in her hand, she laid herself down in the punt so the wooden sides rose above her, blotting out the land. She lay then, quite still, her eyes open. She wanted to see into the sky. She wanted there to be nothing above her.

The punt swayed against the bank, catching gently against the trailing fronds of willow. It inched forward under its own momentum, then, catching at the edge of the stream, began to move slowly, heavily, down the river.

The river rises, swells, overspills, chokes on itself, drowns and rises again. The city is slick and gleaming with the rain that only pauses to catch breath before falling again with all the force of a purgation. It will rain, day after day, sweet water. Far out to the west, the sun breaks through the ragged edge of the storm. A curtain falls, swimming in gold with the sudden flash of a benediction. She does not see as the punt moves its way down the empty corridor of water. Now the edges of the reeds blurred, became indistinct against the grey sky. Coots flash past. Hedges, a greenhouse, and then the open sky of the green, the cobbled pathways and the iron footbridge, down, on, past the boathouses all locked shut.

Time passes. She does not know as the punt is borne on the rising current under the dark spine of the gothic bridge. Lights bloom through high windows, distorted in ripples through old glass. Thoughts half-surfaced; her mother, Arthur, a sad reflection in a shop window of a sagging woman, empty, the taste of cinnamon, a few bars of a half-forgotten tune, a boy with golden skin and the eyes of another century. She is forgetting. The quietness of the river comes to be within her, atom by atom leeching into her pores, staining her the colour of water. The hour unfolded itself, slow as the rising stream. Noises fainted into shades of charcoal and white as drop by drop, the world drowned.

Several hours later, a punt containing the body of a middle-aged woman in a wedding dress was found by a porter against the bank of the river at the back of King’s College. The body bore no signs of having suffered violence; the coroner’s report was to conclude, some days later, that the woman – as yet unidentified - had died of exposure. There was a short report made in the Examiner, stating the facts in brief. The porter’s headlong dash across the forbidden lawn to the lodge had caught the attention of some students, who, running to help, had found themselves unwitting extras in a rare and solemn drama, gathered on the path where the famous chapel meets the river’s edge. Among this small and shocked crowd of onlookers there was one who watched, white-faced, as the embarrassed officers shambled back and forth, the lamplight gleaming off the reflective strips on their jackets. As they finally lifted her up to take her away, the white folds of her dress fell graceful from the policeman’s arms, just as if she were being carried over the threshold.