♦
Richard made his way down the dark stairs. He couldn’t use the bathroom on the landing because of the tangled pipes under the sink. Tubing, plumbing, large-bore wiring. Phobia never quite described it. A discrete period of intense fear or discomfort in which at least 4 of the following 13 symptoms develop abruptly…The four in his case being a choking sensation, feelings of unreality, abdominal distress and a fear of going insane. He couldn’t use Car Park E at work because it meant walking past the ducts at the back of the heating block. Last year he’d been standing on the Circle Line platform at Edgware Road en route to a conference in Reading. The brickwork on the far side of the tracks invisible behind a great rolling wave of sooty cables. He came round with a gash on his head looking up at a ring of people who seemed to have gathered to watch a fight in the playground.
He unbuttoned his pyjama fly and aimed just left of the water to minimise the noise. He should get his prostate checked. The floor was cobbled and cold and the walls smelt of damp but the sink down here was enclosed in a wooden cabinet and the ribbed white shower flex was single and therefore benign. He flushed the toilet and washed his hands. Bed.
2: Saturday
Daisy made herself a mug of sugary tea then went outside in her coat and scarf to watch the dawn come up. A great see-saw of light balanced on the fulcrum of Black Hill, the sun rising on one end, the other end sweeping down the flank of Offa’s Dyke and switching the colours on as it went. The beauty kept slipping through her fingers. The world was so far away and the mind kept saying, Me, me, me. Petty worries rose and nagged, Benjy so distant, Mum angry with her all the time, the horrible graffiti in the changing rooms at school. But the valley…wasn’t this amazing? Look, you had to say to yourself, Look.
The truth was that she hadn’t been able to sleep. She’d tried reading Dracula but what seemed ridiculous in the daylight seemed like documentary before dawn. She felt so lost. You changed at sixteen everyone said, and changing was hard. But this wasn’t normal, it came out of the blue, the unshakeable conviction that while she looked like a human being and acted like a human being there was nothing inside, just slime and circuitry.
Eighteen months ago she found herself talking to Wendy Rogan, the science TA from Year 12. She can’t remember why. Providence, perhaps. Wendy suggested a coffee after school over which she listened in a way that no one else had, not friends, not Mum, not Dad. The following weekend she was having supper in Wendy’s flat when Wendy suggested putting a video on. Daisy thought for several horrified seconds that it was going to be something pornographic, so when it turned out to be a promotional video for the Alpha Course she was initially relieved. A footballer scoring a goal, a model sashaying down the catwalk, a mountaineer climbing a cliff-face, each of them turning to the camera and saying, Is there more to life than this? All camera sparkle and soft rock. She felt ambushed and soiled.
A week later she remembered why the mountaineer seemed familiar. He was Bear Grylls, the guy Alex loved, who climbed Everest and ate maggots and drank his own urine on television. She Googled him and found herself watching, with a sickly mix of fascination and disgust, a video on YouTube in which he was stuck on a tropical island. When you get the chance to be saved, you have to take it. He swung on vines and swam across a bay and built a fire on the beach and signalled to a helicopter using the silver cross on the front of his Bible. It was laughable. But she was crying.
The valley almost full of light now, dew drying, everything washed in our absence. Melissa hated her. There was a kind of reassurance in that. Nothing to lose. No chance of feeling pleased with herself.
Be patient, David had said. The spirit will come. And there was a warmth in that room that she felt nowhere else, being lifted by those soaring voices, but the spirit hadn’t come, only that constant sniping voice. I’m more intelligent than these people. Which was what it meant to be tested, of course, the pressure always at your weakest point. Faith was a belief in the impossible. Of course it looked ridiculous from the outside. Jesus loves you, bitch. Scratched into the metal of her locker door so it couldn’t be washed off.
Suddenly there was a fox. Real orange, not the dirty brown of urban foxes, trotting through the gate, cocksure and proprietorial, like the ghost of a previous owner. Two different times were flowing through the garden. The fox stopped. Had it seen her? Had it smelt her? She didn’t breathe. The gap closed between herself and the world. She was the grass, she was the sunlight, she was the fox. Then she wondered if it was some kind of sign and the spell broke and the fox trotted off round the far side of the house and she was shivering.
♦
Dominic stands under the shower, eyes closed, water pouring onto the crown of his head. Hot water. How amazing to be alive this late in human history. Miners in their tins baths, a kettle on the coals, Queen Elizabeth the First taking three baths a year. But showers were never quite hot enough or strong enough on holiday, were they? That crappy plastic box. Down the corridor Benjy unlocks the mini-kit on the second Captain Brickbeard level and gets the wizard, while Melissa rises through that turbulent region of half-sleep, part of her still at primary school, everything in slo-mo, a tiger padding slowly between the desks. Beams creak and pipes rattle as the house comes to life. A scurry in the roofspace, the same dog far off. Alex pees noisily. The whirr of an electric toothbrush. A cockerel. Daisy pours a small portion of Marks & Spencer’s Deliciously Nutty Crunch into a bowl.
♦
Alex squatted on the flagstones by the front door to lace his trainers then stretched his hamstrings on the ivy-covered sill. The faintest smell of manure on the bright damp air. He set his watch then jogged along the track to the main road, stones crunching and slipping under his trainers. He loved wild places. He felt at ease among lakes and mountains in a way he never did at home or school. Every other weekend he and Jamie would pile into Jamie’s brother’s Transit, bikes on the back, canoes on top, and Josh would drive them to the South Downs, Pembrokeshire, Snowdonia. Put up the tent in darkness and wake in that igloo glow. He climbed the stile and began the long haul to Red Darren, his mind shrinking with the effort and the altitude, this precious trick he had learnt, doubts and worries falling away at four, five, six miles, the fretting self reduced to almost nothing, only the body working like an engine. Dominic and Daisy asked him about it sometimes and assumed his inability to explain was evidence of an inability to feel, but on Llyn Gwynant, on Nine Barrow Down, he experienced a kind of swelling contentment for which they yearned but never quite attained, and the fact that Alex couldn’t explain it, the fact that it was beyond words, was part of the secret.
♦
Because you’ll burn yourself. Angela handed him two eggs. Crack these into the bowl.
What would happen if you and Dad died at the same time?
What would you like to happen? She scraped mushrooms into the pan.
I’d like to go and live with Pavel.
I’d have to check that with Pavel’s mum.
But what will happen to my toys?