She leaves the brush by the doorway and takes the bacon out of the pan and puts it in the oven on the plate. The doorway goes out of the kitchen onto the back yard of the house and it’s where the family and good friends mainly come in and out, during the day. Below the units are sacks of potatoes and tubs and bowls of cleaning things stacked up. The front of the fridge is rusted and pocked but the fridge works. Old and out of place, a chest of drawers fits beside the fridge and holds knives and forks and things.
As she cuts the bread thickly to put in the pan she wishes for a new kitchen. A kitchen gleaming and clean; but mainly she wants cohesion. She is tired of mixed up things.
Behind the house, across the small back yard of broken concrete, the land slopes up. For a while there is bracken, dead and dry now from the long summer, and then the slope sharpens and the forest starts. The leaves are very heavy this year. To the side of the house, where the ground is even, more or less, there is a lawn of sorts and a small rockery made with stones from some of the out-buildings they never rebuilt. The lawn goes along the big edge of the barn and loses itself where the bramble starts before the forest. She opens the door to let the house breathe and looks out at the lawn.
__ the Vegetable Patch
Where the bracken is now, on the slope, they worked hard when they were younger to take this for themselves. First they cleared a break, so the fire could not spread into the trees, then they burned the bracken and bramble and the thin shoots of hazel that had come out of the forest. They did this at the end of summer. Then when the ash and the broken wood had been driven into the earth by the thick rains of Autumn, they began to dig the ground. They dug for a day, and hurt themselves. The next day he hired a rotovator and they cut up the half-acre patch of ground which was still tough work. The smell of the rotovator reminded him of boat engines. The robins were the first to come and take the grubs and worms, and worked around them. Then, when they were inside taking a cup of tea and talking gently together, the bigger more cowardly birds came. The earth was full and hungry.
The frosts fell and nothing grew in the earth. Then, when the winter loosened, they dug the broken soil over to give it air and make it ready for the seeds.
They planted seed potatoes, and cabbages and long rows of onions and beetroot and radishes. They had carrots and parsnips, which needed to be thinned constantly and were a lot of trouble, and pea canes and lettuces. Even with the failures, they had a lot of vegetables. Too many for themselves. They also put in raspberries, still there now, but you had to fight your way to them. Then at some point, and she tries to think quite when, they didn’t plant things anymore and the woods took back the land. It was after the second miscarriage, but she does not remember that.
__ the Finger
Inside she sets the table. The knives and forks and plates in piles on the vinyl cloth. She starts to read her catalogue of supplements; things she hopes will stop her ageing, help her hold less water, help her be less tired and make her want sex more. For her age, she is a very beautiful woman, but she does not see it. It is beginning to go from her. She knows it.
He comes in, scraping his feet on the metal grill outside the back door, not because he needs to, but from habit. Or perhaps it is his announcement — a signal they have always had but never spoken of. They had many of these when they were younger.
She rinses the cafetière and warms the cup with water from the kettle which she’s boiled several times while she has waited for him. She does not make the coffee. Some things she mustn’t do. She’s threatened by the coffee; about how strong to make it, how it tastes when it is made. He makes coffee every day, just for himself as no one else drinks it. He makes a strong pot full of coffee at this time of the morning and it does him for the day, warming up the cupfuls in a pan as they are needed — which makes them stronger as the day goes on. No one else touches the pan. She says it’s why he does not sleep. His first coffee each morning is the remnants of the night before because grinding the beans he does not want to wake the house, and the children sleep above the thin ceiling of the kitchen.
He sits at the table with a loose fist and runs his thumb over the first joint of his forefinger in the way he has, so it makes a quiet purring sound, like rubbing leather.
‘What about the dosing?’
‘It’ll have to wait,’ he says.
He rubs his finger. He does this always, at table, talking, or reading a paper, even with the handle of a cup held there, so that this part of his finger is smooth and shines. Whenever he’s at rest.
‘I don’t know,’ he says. ‘I’ve checked the obvious places and she’s not there. She’s got her head down and gone.’ He does not tell her about the stillborn calf.
‘It’s typical. It has to be today,’ she says. ‘I should have got up to check.’
‘It would have gone anyway,’ he says quietly.
He looks down at the missing part of his little finger on his right hand and makes the sound against his thumb again. She still blames herself for this damage to him. He was trying to free the bailer from the new tractor and she had done something and the catch had just bit down. He takes a mouthful of coffee. It was a clean cut and it healed well and he could have lost his hand instead. That’s how he looked at it. In some ways he loves it.
She’d burned the toast so he’s gone quietly over and made some more while she tried to rescue the wrecked toast.
‘The vet phoned about Curly,’ she says.
‘Oh.’
‘He wants to come today.’
He knows the vet will put the old dog down. Not today, he thinks. It’s a hard thing to have to have today, if he has to find the cow too.
‘You should have some breakfast,’ he says to her. It’s odd how seriously we take the silly names of animals.
The door latch snaps and Emmy comes in still dressed in her pyjamas and her blanket tucked in her hand, thumb in her mouth. She shuffles over to the old settle and curls up with her green and purple zebra. She would come down when she heard her parents talking in the kitchen below in the morning.
‘Hello sweetie,’ says her mother.
She shines her eyes up at her mother, looks to her father quickly, shyly. Something secret passes between them and she smiles and settles. They stop talking of the cow.
He sits there rubbing his finger and looking at the stump of his little finger fondly.
‘It’s going to be hot again today,’ he says.
Chapter Two the Rain
There had been much rain. In the early part of the year and through the Autumn before, the rain came down and the fields were loud with grass and the rivers full and fast.
Then at some point in the early morning of March 11th something changed. The rain stopped; that day the sun came out hot and fast and deliberately. There had been a geomagnetic storm. Epileptics had fits, and people prone to strokes or with weak hearts were ill, some died. The electric things of our body went wrong in many people. The swallows came early, and that day a cloud of racing pigeons and one white dove landed at the farm. They came suddenly and curiously and were very lost. Emmy fell in love with the long white dove.
Nobody — not the ‘experts’ anyway, admitted any link between the storms and the sudden change of things; but storms like this could shut down warships and satellites, and the War Office was always watching out for them. In their records, it says the storm on March 11th was a massive one.
Then it rained in May. He remembers the shearers — three men — moving methodically around the barn; the process: the unspoken movement of them all.