Early one night there was a knock at the door. I opened it. It was Rufus.
“Hi, May,” he said. “Is Lucy here?” I yelled to my mother, but she had already heard his voice and was at my side. “Do you want to go for a walk?” he asked us. She had to hold her lips together so she wouldn’t smile. I think she was hoping for this, that he would walk up the stairs and knock on our door. She was always making excuses to go downstairs, to make sure the phone worked, to check the post.
The four of us had to walk across a field of sheep to get to the woods. They were asleep in bundles and ran away from us as we walked through. We were as quiet as possible; we tiptoed past them. The bravest ones stood up on their feet and made a noise at us.
“I wish we didn’t have to disturb them,” Rufus said.
There was another way to the woods, down the drive and past the farmer’s house.
“We could have gone the other way, Mum,” I said.
“I know, I’m sorry, I didn’t think about the sheep.” She said it like she was kicking herself.
“Don’t worry, they’ll go back to sleep. I didn’t mean it like that. I just meant as a person, being a person, people always disturb other things . . . .” He was explaining away, moving his hand in the air, apologizing. His voice was soft and sorry; he knew how easy it was to make her stumble.
“Mum says she’s always the one being bothered,” Eden said, running up to take her hand. “‘Mum, where’s my book? Mum, where’s my socks? Mum, where’s my bum?’” He was skipping up and down, holding on to our mother’s hand, swinging her arm. When they laughed, they looked at each other, my mother and Rufus.
“Skip with me!” Eden said, pulling her ahead. He was happy outside at night; he wasn’t even scared. Rufus and I were left behind, walking together.
“I know what you mean,” I said, walking closer to him so my mother wouldn’t hear me. “Because once I was walking home from school and it was dark because it was winter, so I couldn’t see the pavement.” He leaned his face closer to hear me. I was nervous but I liked him because he seemed nervous too. My mother looked back at us and I closed my mouth. When she looked away I said, “I stepped on something and it smushed underneath my foot. I felt it, but I kept walking and didn’t look at it; but I know it was a snail, and I kept thinking that it was trying to cross the road to get to its babies or that it was in love and was going to meet the other snail. And I ruined it all.” I couldn’t really explain it to him, the feeling of having ruined something else’s life.
“That’s exactly what I meant,” he said to me, and lifted his head slowly so he stood straight. We walked on a little further side by side. The woods looked like a curtain in front of us. It wasn’t a dark night. The sky was the colour of the sea in winter, that grey-blue. The moon was almost full, full and low.
We could see our path and each other clearly. When I looked behind us, the sheep were back together again in bundles on the short grass that they eat and sleep on. It’s everything to them.
The wind blew in from the sea, which you could hear somewhere out there. On the other side, the field, suddenly stopped and dropped into the water. You had to be careful on dark nights, when there was no moon, not to walk straight off the cliff. There was only a low barbed-wire fence to keep the sheep in. This was the cliff where, one night, a teenage boy left his girlfriend in a bar and took a train late at night, drunk, drunk with a heavy drowning heart, and threw himself onto the sharp and jagged rocks below. I wondered if maybe, in the middle of the air, he wished he hadn’t. Don’t run at night, especially in the fog.
“Why do you think the sheep never fall off?” I asked Rufus, but he didn’t answer. I looked up at him to see if he heard and was thinking about it. He was looking straight ahead, at my mother and Eden.
“Sorry, what?” he asked, leaning forward again.
“Nothing.”
The woods were all around us. We followed the trail that led to the wheat fields. Eden thought we were looking for the haunted house, but I had walked this path to its end and had never seen it. To the end and back takes an hour and a half; I just walked and walked. On the way home I would imagine that my father had made a surprise visit from London to see me and that he would be walking from the house, through the woods towards me. But he never was. Then it turned into a phone call, and I imagined that there would be a note on the table in my mother’s handwriting that he had phoned. That’s what happens to hope: it gets smaller and smaller.
Eden walked along behind Mum, swinging his arms and looking at the ground. He was holding his little black torch now that we were in the woods and it was darker. Sometimes he would start to sing a few lines of that song, the summer song, the one Jolene and I waited for on the radio. It was everywhere that summer and now it was in the middle of the woods.
“Now all the trees have heard it too,” Rufus said. My mother laughed. Everything he said made her laugh.
“Look!” Eden shone the torch at something on the ground. “Look, Mum! Mum, look!” He scuffled down to his knees and looked at the spot like a squinty-eyed inspector.
“What? What is it?” she asked, kneeling down next to him. Rufus knelt down next to her to get a good look too. I just stood there. I knew Eden was just getting excited about a root or leaf or something.
They stared quietly at the spot where Eden shone the light for a few minutes until Rufus said, “What are we looking at?”
“That rock!” Eden shouted. He shone the light on a big mossy rock. “It looks like the rock that had King Arthur’s sword in it!”
They moved in a little closer and huddled around the rock as though it were a tiny fire on a freezing night. There was a dent in the top and Rufus ran his finger over it. Then he looked up at my mother, keeping his hand on the rock. I saw him looking at her. The light from the torch shone on her mouth and neck and breath. When she turned to him, their eyes caught and he looked lost for a moment. Then she turned quickly towards Eden and asked, “Is it the rock?” Her voice shook. Rufus looked down and my mother turned her face back to the rock and asked, without looking at him, “What do you think?”
“It could be. It’s possible. It looks like a sword was in it,” Rufus told Eden.
“I really think it is. We just learned about it in school and I saw the picture and it looks just like this.” Eden couldn’t believe his luck; he had finally found something. It wasn’t a leprechaun, it wasn’t the haunted house; Eden had found King Arthur’s stone.
“Wasn’t it a big stone in a lake?” I said.
“Oh.” Eden let out a long moan and flung his hand to his head like he was swatting a mosquito. “I forgot about the lake,” he moaned.
“Well, maybe there was a lake here and it dried up. It was a long, long time ago,” Rufus said. Eden filled up with air again; he came back to life instantly.
“I bet it did. It did! I knew it.”
“We’ll get a book from the library and find out,” my mother said to him as she stood up and brushed the leaves from her clothes. We all stood up except Rufus, still on his knees. My mother held out her hand to him. He took it and she pulled him up. I saw his face wince.
“Thank you,” he said, when he was standing. “I have a bad leg.” He held on to her hand.
“Should we turn back?” my mother asked, looking at Rufus as their hands slid apart.
“What happened to your leg?” Eden asked, looking up at him.
“I can’t remember exactly, but I hurt it when I was very young.”
“Can you swim?” Eden wanted to know.
Rufus nodded.
“Can you run?”
He nodded again. “But not very fast.”
“Can you ride a bike?”
“That’s easy. It doesn’t hurt at all.”
The air was cooler now; our breath looked like thin smoke in front of us. A sound like a howl came from the trees. In the daytime you only hear the leaves beneath you, the singing birds, and, in winter, the creaking ice, but at night there are other sounds in the woods. I shivered, but not because I was cold. No one spoke. A low whispering sound came from deeper inside the woods and then a sharp cry.
“I’m getting a little tired and hungry for cheese toast,” Eden said. I wanted to go home too. That’s what houses are for, people at night. We turned around and walked back quietly through the woods.
…
Something woke me. A sound. It sounded like a trumpet. I thought someone was playing the trumpet downstairs. My eyes stung, they were wide open. Some people can sleep through anything.
Once I phoned my father, it was only six or seven in the evening; I was alone in the house and wanted to talk to him. A man answered the phone, but it wasn’t him, it was his friend Fred, who sells pills to people—all different colours for all different things. He keeps them hidden in the hollow body of a baby doll.
Fred said, “Hold on a minute, will you?”
I waited with the phone to my ear. I waited a long time; I thought maybe we had been disconnected.
Finally someone picked up the phone. It was Fred again. “Yeah, he’s knackered,” he said, in his heavy, lazy voice. “He just took a sleeping pill. He’s having a little lie-down on the sofa.”
“Okay,” I said, like it was nothing, and put the phone down. I looked at it for a moment. Everything was quiet around me. I imagined my father lying on the sofa with his feet up, not wanting to be bothered, looking at the phone, looking at his feet, a cigarette in his hand, a record on. “This is a good track,” he’d say to Fred when he came back in the room, after he’d hung up the phone.
I was wide awake now, wondering if I would ever be too tired to talk to my father on the phone. Then I heard it again, the sound from downstairs. I sat up in bed. It was the middle of night and anything can happen then. Things can move around: toy animals, books, painted glass jars filled with earrings and hair clips. I’ve seen things happen. Once, I was lying on the top bunk—it was late and my light was on, just a bare bulb hanging in the middle of the room with a shoelace pull string—and I saw something fly across the room, slowly. A little black bird! A little black bird flew across my room and then disappeared. It really did. I saw it, and it wasn’t just because I was young and thought everything was alive.
I put my feet on the floor. I was still afraid something would grab my ankle from under the bed, so I ran to the door. A grey-blue light came in through the hallway windows. As I walked down the stairs the sounds came closer; they rose up around me, like a choir. My face and chest felt warm, almost hot, as though I was sitting next to a fire.
At the bottom of the stairs, in between the crash and howl from the waves and the wind, I could hear the sounds of a school yard, a playground, a children’s playground. The sound of running feet, a bell from an ice-cream van, the squeak of the swings. “Push me higher!” Young voices, high voices, boys’ and girls’ voices. They were coming from the yellow living room at the end of the hallway. The door was open a crack; a light was on inside. I walked towards it.
Outside the door, the air smelled of soapy warm bathwater. I put my hand on the knob and pushed it open. The light shone in my eyes, very yellow and too bright. I stepped back and put my hand above my eyes. I saw two people sitting on the floor across from a brightly coloured board game. A boy and a girl, younger than me but older than Eden. They were wearing their school uniforms. I closed my eyes and saw red. The next time I opened them the light was calmer. My mother and Rufus sat on the floor across from each other playing a game of Scrabble.
My mother was laughing. She was really laughing, bending over at the waist. Rufus looked at me as I stood in the doorway. “She keeps trying to add two ‘eds’ to everything,” he said. He was laughing too; his eyes were bright.
“It’s the double past!” she said, her eyes shiny and her cheeks red. She looked like a girl.
“Did we wake you?” my mother asked. She looked like she was about to start laughing again. I didn’t answer because I wasn’t sure. I sat down on the sofa and pulled my legs to my chest. There was a folded plaid blanket on the arm of the sofa; I put it over my feet and lay down. A fire was burning low in the fireplace. There was a record playing. I closed my eyes and listened for the trumpet.
I was almost asleep when I heard Rufus say in a low voice, “Why did you leave him?”
“What?” my mother asked, as though she hadn’t heard.
“Their father,” he said.
“They have different fathers. May’s father is Simon. Eden’s father was Paul. I left Simon because I wasn’t in love with him. I don’t think he was really in love with me. We were both young; I was twenty when I had May. There was no love lost, as Annabel would say.”
“Who’s Paul?” Rufus asked. His voice sounded stiff.
“An old boyfriend . . . . May thought he was always drunk, but he was high.” She sounded like she was talking to an old friend, Annabel or Suzy. Her voice didn’t change when she spoke to him, the way it sometimes did with men.
I wanted her to talk about my father, not Eden’s.
“I got pregnant. I didn’t want to have another child.”
When she said things like that, that she didn’t want another child, I didn’t know what to think of myself.
“I went to stay with my friend Suzy in her mother’s house in Somerset,” she told him. “She had two big dogs, and May used to follow them into the woods by herself. We’d be so stoned we wouldn’t even notice. Then when we did I’d be in a huge panic and run around to all the neighbours and phone the police. Everyone would be looking for her. Once, I was sure I’d lost her, she was gone for three hours, but then someone found her walking down the road with one of the dogs.”
My mother’s voice sounded slow and loose, like beads on a necklace with a string that’s too long.
“Anyway Suzy drove me to the clinic, and May sat in the back seat”.
I remembered sitting in the back of the car. No one would tell me where we were going. The trees were all bare bones and the sky was white, it was that kind of winter day. I was different then. I would sit on my mother’s lap and put my head on her chest; inside me was just me and warm blue water.
I pulled the blanket up slowly, over my face, so Rufus and my mother couldn’t see that I was listening. When I remembered being little, in the back of that car, it made me feel like I missed someone.
My mother was still telling him the story.
“On the way, Suzy pointed to the side of the road and said, ‘Did you see that dead deer?’ Then May said, ‘Where’s the dead deer? Where’s the dead deer?’”
She was imitating my voice, the way it used to sound, small and high.
“She was looking all over for the deer. I told her that we had already passed it, but she kept turning around trying to see it. ‘Dead deer? Dead deer? Where’s the dead deer?’ she kept saying the whole drive. We tried to play I Spy and asked her if she wanted an ice lolly, but she wouldn’t stop asking about the dead deer . . . . There was something about the way she kept saying ‘dead deer’, over and over, that made me change my mind.”
It was my fault Eden was born.
“Does Eden ever see him?”
“Paul? No, he didn’t want to have a child. Eden never even asks about him,” my mother said.
I was waiting for her to tell him about my father.
But the next time she spoke she said, “It’s your go.”
“My letters are terrible. Where’s May’s father?”
“In London somewhere . . . .” I was wide awake with the blanket over my face. I opened my eyes. I thought I would be able to hear better. Then the record ended and the next thing she said was, “What should we listen to?”
I heard her stand up and lift the needle; it made a scratchy sound.
No one spoke for a while. Then she said, “I’m getting tired.”
“Do you want me to take her upstairs?” I heard him ask.
“No, she’s fine.” I felt my mother pull the blanket down to cover my feet; then she slowly lifted it off my face. She didn’t want me to suffocate in the night.
They turned the lights out and left. I heard him say good night to her in the hallway, and I heard them walk away from each other.
I lay there in the dark, on the sofa, with the plaid blanket over me. I felt like I was sinking to sleep. Then I heard someone walk into the room, quietly. I held my breath, I could hear breathing, close to me. I opened my eyes and waited for the dark to turn a lighter grey. I saw someone, a body, lying down on the floor next to the sofa.
“Mum?”
“Yes.”
“What are you doing?”
“I’m just thinking, don’t worry.” Her voice sounded like it was sailing off somewhere.
I fell asleep that way, in the living room, in the middle of the night, while my mother slept below me, on the floor, in the place where Rufus had been before.