♦
It takes twenty-five minutes to attach one stupid bit of plastic to another but there’s no way Alex is going to ask Dad for help. The inane conversation behind him stops eventually, thank goodness. It’s great for a few days but I think I’d kill myself after a month in a place like this. Fuckwit. The splash of the mop and the scrape of the bucket, the rhythm just slow enough to show that he wasn’t putting any effort in. Will he make everything worse or better if he confronts Dad? He wants someone older and wiser to tell him what to do, but there is no one. He is out of the harbour mouth now and he can feel the long sway of the ocean proper. One more turn of the nail. He unrolls a length of electrical tape and bites it off with his teeth. Leaning into the recess he tapes the nail to the body of the pipe to keep his makeshift tourniquet tight. Round once, three, seven times. It’s not pretty but it looks serviceable. He stands up. Soiled wet elbows, soiled wet knees.
Done? His father opens the back door and pours another bucket of dirty water into the stone gutter.
Alex twists the big dial to Drain and restarts the machine. The drum turns over a few times, then picks up speed, juddering. He looks into the recess. The makeshift junction holds without leaking. Result.
As he’s leaving the room, Dominic touches his arm. Alex.
Alex fixes his attention on the light switch.
What’s the matter?
Alex steps back very slowly to disengage from his father’s touch. Like two spacecraft undocking. If he says anything now he will explode. He walks slowly towards the door.
Alex…?
♦
She didn’t know who she was any more, that was the truth of it. The newel post, her fairy-tale father, ‘My Funny Valentine’. She had given up trying to remember her own bedroom. It was like moving to the edge of a cliff and gazing down through miles of empty air. You thought you were anchored by the tick of the clock, the sound of your children in the garden, these hands gripping the arms of this chair. Reality. It meant nothing. It was the story that mattered, the story that held you together, the satisfaction of turning those pages, going back to favourite scenes over and over, a book at bedtime, the reassurance of it. Saying, This happened…Then that happened…Saying, This is me. But what is her story? Losing the plot. The deep truths hidden in the throwaway phrase. She was coming, wasn’t she? Karen was coming. Her vengeful little angel.
♦
Kick, says Daisy. Kick your legs right up. And he manages it, just, despite gymnastics totally not being his forte. She holds his ankles and yanks them higher to straighten his knees.
And the world is suddenly upside down, his face fat with blood, a delicious wobble in his arms. He’s like Atlas, carrying the planet on his upturned hands. And then he can’t hold it any longer. His arms give way and he crumples onto the grass, shrieking and laughing and rolling down the hill. But he lands on a stiff little thorn branch. Shit bugger bloody, shit bugger bloody.
Benjy…?
He gets to his feet and does a little anaesthetic dance. The pain is going down. But then he takes his hand away and sees the four red lines cut into the soft flesh of his underarm, tiny red drops blooming. He starts to cry and Daisy holds her arms open. Hey, Action Man. So he comes and slumps in between her legs and she hugs him.
Shit shit shit.
She rocks him gently. She remembers how this used to feel, how it still feels. Nothing you can do, just wait for the time to pass. The Armour of Christ. She’s not angry now, nor as confident, just exhausted, mostly. Thinking and feeling too many things in too short a time.
But Benjy is crying not just about the wound on his arm, he is also crying about the woman who is being mean to Dad. He doesn’t like to see adults suffering. He still believes that when he reaches the age of twenty-one he will no longer be sad, he will no longer be afraid, he will no longer be bullied. It is a hard clear star he can fix his quadrant on. But if that woman at work can bully Dad…
My turn, says Daisy.
Benjy dries his eyes and rolls away so that she can stand up. She finds a little pillow of grass. Forehead down, hands planted. A little push and her legs rise into the blue. Like diving into the earth. Absolutely vertical. The tiniest splash and little waves of earth spreading away from the spot where you vanished into the dark. Limestone, granite, basalt.
Mum bought a weird doll, says Benjy.
What kind of weird? She wondered how long you’d have to stay like this before it started feeling normal, till it looked right.
She said it was for someone, then she said it was for her.
Daisy thought about the baby who died, those scary thoughts you got sometimes. What if I were someone else? What if I never reached the world? It’s something for school. Just to reassure him. A project. Though God alone knows what Mum was up to.
That’s all right, then.
Yeh, that’s all right.
Can we go back now?
Of course. A few more precious seconds then she gave in to gravity.
♦
Say it began with shadows, that it was shadows always. The sun above us, below us a dark figure that is ourselves and not ourselves. Look how it follows me, see how we dance in time. Narcissus, all of us, right from the beginning. Trace your hand on the rock wall of this cave, using flint, using charcoal. Now the ghost of you will live on after you have gone. Draw lines in the dirt. This is the wolf and that is the river. There are the hills and the men who live beyond them. This is how we can trap the wolf. This is how we can kill the men. Imagined futures breeding and branching. We are, I know not why, double within ourselves. So many different things to want and fear. Ghosts fighting for possession of a body.
Gather round the fire, says the old man. Once upon a time… And suddenly we are transported to a world that seems both strange and familiar. Angels and demons, wolves and shadows, the men who live beyond the hills.
♦
The salmon wasn’t going to fit into a single baking tray, was it? Louisa should have thought of that in the shop. She would have to rearrange it after baking, cut-and-shut, like a crashed car. She placed the jar of honey and the jar of olives on opposite corners of the cookbook to hold it open. Foil, peppercorns, mustard. Open the fridge. Sour cream, dill. Amazing you could get it here. She looked out of the window and saw Benjy and Daisy returning from a walk. It had happened this week, hadn’t it, Daisy realising? Suddenly it was obvious, now that she thought about it. The way she held herself, some tension gone. Memories of that ghastly funeral, the way she sang the hymns, trying so hard to put her heart into something. She hadn’t told her parents, had she? Or perhaps she’d told them and it had gone down badly. Angela’s weird behaviour, perhaps it had nothing to do with the baby dying, or not that kind of baby dying.