IT WAS NEVER meant to be a vast life anyway. Small, he’d said. We’ll live like dormice, fuck like rabbits. He was drafting his resignation letter at the time.
But when she arrived, and in the dark, her breath took up all the room. A cold place, grey stone, thick slate, and damp. It was the first thing she could smell. Then, that stench that comes with opening a fridge door that hasn’t been used in months.
She hit the lights.
Jesus, Michael.
He was sitting at the table with a glass of wine and a bouquet of nettles wrapped in silver foil.
You took your time.
He pushed the stinging bouquet towards her.
She doesn’t look at them. She knows what he wants her to say.
How long have you been here? I thought we said eight.
She is sharp with him. He is sharper with her.
Where have you been?
What do you mean where have I been?
She throws her car keys onto the table in front of him.
Leaving, Michael. It takes time to leave.
He looks at her jealously. Starts with the questions. How was it? How did he take it? Did you get lost on the way up? I told you—left turn at the crossroads, left again. You can miss it completely in the fog. Did you miss it?
Yes, she’d missed it. She’d had to go back down to come up again by which time the fog had settled in dense chunks. As she’d started back down, she had kept going. Missed the turning a second time. There were less people in the world up here than there were down there. Not enough people and you missed your way. She’d not seen a signpost in hours. It’d dropped dark and got darker.
I don’t know if I can do this, Michael.
He pushes the bouquet of nettles closer. She ignores them. She is in no mood. Thinks of her mother, all of a sudden. Their last cup of tea.
No man is a good man. Her mother’s words. He is just a man.
She turns around. She looks at the colour on the walls. It’s the same colour as the old flannel she would bathe her mother with. An only child. So much responsibility in the end.
Wow. It really is small.
She stretches out her arms. She can touch both sides of the walls in both directions with the palm of her hands. She could, with fingers splayed, have a thumb on where she’d left and little finger on where she’d come to on the map. It’d not seemed so far on paper.
How in the hell did you bring up kids here?
We did.
When he speaks, he smokes, the air is so cold. She catches it with her hands, warms it, blows it back to him. This was not how she’d imagined it.
He is behind her now. She can feel the nettles on the back of her neck. She brushes him off.
Stop it. I’ve only just walked in.
She picks up a kettle, stainless steel and heavy with water.
Cup of tea?
He does not answer. He is looking for more wine.
You’ve been drinking all day, haven’t you?
He does not answer that either.
She knows better than to ask him again.
You got what you wanted.
Perhaps. But now she’s not so sure.
She finds mugs, tea-stained and dusty. Turns on the tap at the sink and runs her fingers under the water.
Is there any hot water?
The water runs cold.
Is there no hot water?
He has found wine. Red. He unscrews the cap, returns to the table to fill his glass.
No hot water at all?
She thinks about this. Then of the nettles. She will need hot water, she says. A bath, at least. He gestures towards the log burner behind him. It is heavy, black and silent; lifts an iron kettle off a stand and places it on the top.
Hot water, he says.
She sucks in her breath.
No. It’s not properly sealed. I’ll boil the kettle instead.
~
The kettle in the kitchen is over-boiling. She turns it off at the wall. The kitchen is full of smoke. She thinks about opening the door but she’s not ready to let the outside in. She stands in the steam and closes her eyes. There is a smell, suddenly, like open flesh, and she looks down at the floor.
What’s that smell?
He is at the log burner, filling it with sticks.
Can you smell it?
He strikes a match. Throws it onto the sticks.
God, what is that smell?
He bends down to blow on the sticks.
Can’t you smell it?
He looks up from the log burner with sooty hands. She stares at his hands for so long they no longer look part of his body.
You were asked not to light it, she says. They begged you not to light it. Why didn’t you do as you were told?
She goes back into the kitchen and drops two teabags into the two mugs she has swilled with cold water. She lifts the kettle. The water that comes out is brown. Black bits float in it. Like petals drooping at an unattended grave. She lifts the lid off the kettle, screams and drops it to the floor. Screams again because she is scalded. Kicks the kettle. It hits Michael in the shin.
There is something in the kettle boiled to death and the kitchen is filled with smoke.
You’re on fire, she says.
Warm your hands on me, then.
But when she touches him he is so cold, her hands go right through him.
They curl up on the settee in the little front room. The open fire cackles. They drink more wine. He has forgotten about the nettles and she has scalded her foot. A dampened tea towel is wrapped around it. A blister she will have to burst come morning.
I can’t believe you all actually lived here, she says. It’s so small. It’s like we’ve been buried into the hill.
He watches the fire.
It’s all so big to a kid. We were never in anyway. We lived out there.
He rubs his mouth against the top of her head. She feels his teeth against her skin.
You smell like wet ash, she says.
She thinks of the nettles on the dining-room table and wonders if she should throw them on the fire for more warmth. Enough, she will say. Stop making me do these things. I’m here now. I’m here. I’ve left.
She leans forward to lift the tea towel, to check on her foot.
God, that really hurt, she says.
He examines her foot. It needs an expert’s attention but the hospital is over thirty miles away. And he is drunk. And she is almost. And they are here. They are actually here.
Fron, she says. Who’d have thought that we’d end up trying to start up in Fron?
He jerks suddenly, lunges, and he’s sick, violently and red in the coat scuttle. He whips the tea towel off her foot and holds it against his mouth. Vomits again. She sighs. He retches. Then she laughs. So does he.
Exactly how we met, she says.
When she wakes in the morning she is alone. His side of the bed is cold. She takes in the room. There is no daylight, and she wonders for the time. She’d counted five clocks in the house last night, all stopped at different times. Twenty past four. Quarter past eight. She lies there waiting. He will bring her coffee soon. They will make love. They will talk about how to fill the day. Ten to seven. Just after nine. They will go outside. He will show her the things he has talked about so often, the views he’s created in her mind. Five to twelve. She cannot believe they are actually here. It is primitive. Way beyond. Fron.
She doesn’t know if she can do this. This is too far away.
She needs to use the bathroom. Swings her legs out of the bed, is surprised to find she is dressed. Leggings. T-shirt. She cannot remember putting these back on. She remembers her foot, looks down and sees nothing. She sits back on the bed and lifts her foot to check again. No red mark. No blister. She listens. Looks about the room. Michael?
Silence replies.
She pads along the small landing where an electric heater ticks out a waft of warm air. She finds comfort in the heat, stands there, for a second or two, warming her feet. Then she calls him again.
Michael?
This time she questions him, like she has always done. Like he her.
Will you leave her?
Will you leave him?
There is still so much to tell each other.
I have a place, in the hills, under the sky. No one will know we are there.
Are you embarrassed of me, Michael?
No. But I do want to run away with you.
She must use the bathroom. She hovers over the toilet for the seat is icy cold. Smells the damp up above, down below. This place is awful, she thinks. Wills herself to think of it otherwise. Lives left behind. Lives started again. Living like dormice, fucking like rabbits.
Michael? Her voice is more determined.
She goes downstairs. A shaft of daylight shimmers on the carpet in front of her. Dust dances within it. She sees pictures now, on the wall, three brown-haired boys and the lone blue-eyed girl that would leave school to bear a child no one knew what to do with; all in slate-grey uniforms and drawn-on smiles. Another clock. One she had not seen last night. Twenty-five past five. Two hands entwined on the same number.
Michael?
She goes into the small living room. Finds the tea towel on the carpet but the coal scuttle is empty and scrubbed clean. She holds up the tea towel with her fingertips and can see no evidence of the night’s events.
There would be no room for a child anyway. Two people is even too many.
Michael?
Afraid now. She goes into the smaller room at the back of the house. On the table, a full glass of red wine and a bouquet of nettles. There is no fire. The stone floor underneath feels made of ice. In the tiny kitchen, everything as it was, as if she had not even arrived. She looks inside the kettle with half-slit eyes and is relieved to find it empty.
He has gone to get supplies, she tells herself, filling the kettle with the cold, cold water from the tap. This was his home, where he grew up, he will have gone to knock on a neighbour, inform them of his return. She will meet them later. You and your fancy bright life, they will say. You won’t last five minutes up here. She drops a teabag into a mug. Opens the fridge for the milk and it’s not there. She looks down into the bag of shopping she’d brought with her last night and the two pints are not there either.
Goddamn you, Michael.
He has drunk the milk. He has gone to get milk. She goes back upstairs to shower.
~
She dresses in his clothes. Thinks about unpacking a case. She opens the wardrobe and coughs at the dust. She remembers the shopping list. Cleaning products. Freezer items. Plenty of wine. They are just three weeks into January and he has told her of harsh winters frozen in, of cracked lips and cold sores, of journeys never made. She descends the stairs as she would a hill, on the balls of her feet. Her mug of tea with the teabag still stewing waits for further instruction. Like she waits. She does not know what to do up here in Fron. How people are expected to live here when winter sets in. She pulls on her walking shoes. Thinks about her scalded foot. Removes the shoe, then the sock—it’s like nothing has happened. She puts the shoes back on. Grabs her jacket and opens the kitchen door.
The fog weighs heavy. Something crows. She can barely see where she is and is afraid to go too far in case she should not find her way back. She takes small steps. That’s what they will do: take small steps. Twenty years of marriage for her. His second marriage for him. She thanks God again for not giving her children. Thinks of Michael’s daughter who didn’t make it past four. Damage limitation, they’d called it. She was a very poorly soul. She’d watched her husband pack her cases himself and put them into the boot of her car.
That’s it?
That’s it. You must do what you have to do.
He even shakes her hand and thanks her for giving it a go.
She turns to look back at the cottage. She has barely gone a few metres and yet it seems like miles away. Whitewashed and desolate yet smoke pluming from the chimney. Neither fire was lit when she left. Michael must be back. She wonders when he passed her and how they’d missed each other. Just think, she would say, if you’d not looked at me as I’d looked at you. We would have missed each other. We would never have known. She pulls her jacket tighter and heads back towards the little cottage under the hill she now cannot see for the fog.
She opens the back door and stamps her feet on a doormat as if they are caked in snow.
Michael? She blows into her hands. Michael?
In the dining room the glass of red, the nettles lying beside. In the living room, the tea towel where she’d left it on the floor. Both fires out.
Michael?
She runs back outside. It doesn’t matter how far or if she can make her way back, she just needs to see, see it again from over here and sure enough, smoke, billowing now, from the chimney of the little cottage under the hill she cannot see for the fog. She runs back to the house.
Michael!
Glass of red on the table with the nettles lying beside. In the living room the tea towel where she’d left it on the floor.
Michael?
She wonders if there is another room she doesn’t know about.
She wonders how six people coped with icicles as perilous as thorns.
She runs back outside and to her car, cups her hand against the window and sees only a map on the passenger seat, a blunt red line around the contours of Fron.
She runs back to the house for her keys. She will go looking for him. As he said he would look for her. Because this is it now, this is us.
He is hiding her away.
She finds her handbag and finds her keys, runs back to the car. She starts to drive. The fog is everywhere and everywhere there is fog, but she can just make out the lane straight ahead. She’s afraid to blink. She wipes her nose, is astonished to find she is crying, and punches the glovebox open to find tissues. She drives and she drives and feels the lane lowering, as if she is sinking, as if the world below is devouring her. She puts her foot down. She can see more clearly now and yes, there is the grey pencil line of the sea; the darker blunter pencil that colours in the sky. Doll-white cottages dotted here, dotted there. Like a world without sides up here. Hell up high. She curses him.
Fuck you, Michael. You wanted this. You wanted this. They were just looks, Michael. Nosy parkers and blabbermouths. We would have survived.
And drives faster, looking for life.
A house on the roadside. She runs to it, hammers on the door. A shadow forms, in the frosted glass, a key is turned. A man, old and hunched in holed clothes and slippers.
Michael, she spits. Michael Connolly. Have you seen him?
The old man cups a hand around his ear.
Michael Connolly, she shouts. From Fron. Have you seen him?
The old man says something, holds out his hands. She says his name again—Michael Connolly—and points to the sky around her—from Fron, Fron—and the old man looks concerned, says something she cannot understand. He is Welsh. She cannot speak Welsh, doesn’t understand Welsh. She throws her hands over her head and runs back to the car. When she looks back the door has been closed and the old man has gone. Like he too was never there.
She drives further down the lane that feels far longer than how it felt last night when she’d arrived. When she’d driven, heart in mouth, map on seat, a red line circling the word Fron, and smiling. She had found him. He’d treated her scalded ankle in A&E then thrown up in a bedpan with the winter vomiting bug.
Who looks after you? she’d asked.
He’d sent her a bunch of nettles the next day. Broken the rules, found her address. You’ve stung me, the card said.
Later, he tells her where they can go. Fron, he says, where he’s from. Hills like breasts. Fog like a beast. He holds onto her shoulders as he convinces her. Sucks on her like a child.
And then she sees him. He’s there, just up ahead in a field, and he holds onto a little girl’s hand. She is skipping. She wears wellington boots. Her hair, she swears, is pure gold. He bends down with her to look at something in the grass.
She stops the car.
They are picking nettles. It is a field of nettles they cannot feel. And the nettles will all be for her.
She drives back to the little cottage sinking deeper into fog under the hill. She repacks the car and leaves him no note. She is not sorry and has no regrets. As she drives past the field she sees him still there and this time he turns and waves.
She tells herself: there was no scalded foot. No dead mouse in the kettle, and the clocks had all stopped for the Connollys up in Fron as the smoke filled each little room and took their lives one by one. He had gone home as they had all gone home. His mother’s last Christmas, the father long gone; three brothers. The sister. To draw up a contract. To say their goodbyes. None of them ever meant to set this world alight.
It’s freezing in here, Mother. Light the fire.
It’s not that cold, Michael. Put a jumper on. Anyway, I think the seal’s gone.
The sister mocks: And you’re the one who wants to live in this place?
I do.
You won’t survive the night.
That’s why I’m lighting the fire.
Don’t light the fire, Michael. Please don’t light the fire.
Too late.
But the fire burned much later.
She stops the car. This must be it. It has to be it. For there is the view and there is the little cottage under the hill over there. Where we will start again, he’d said. Just as the road ends.
She lifts the box from the well of the passenger seat and heads back towards that nowhere called Fron, scattering him all the way.