A GLASS OF WATER

She brings him a glass of water. A tall glass beaded with droplets that sweat against her hand. He’s crouching in the garden, a heap of stone piled up, a string stretched between two beanpoles. A spade against the cherry tree, the lump hammer set aside. He waves away a wasp, pulls off the leather gauntlets and takes the glass. Zoscia touches his arm. His skin is brown from a long summer, his hair faded blond across the line of muscle.

– It’s looking really good!

Sunday morning. The bell is ringing at the new church, a single repetitive note that blurs with distance. He’s looking beyond her. A flycatcher is working the air between a telegraph post and a crab-apple branch bright with fruit. In the war they shot three partisans against the old church, then burned it down. Carl pulls his shirt from his armpits. The sun is still hot, even in September. Zoscia tries again.

– It’s going to be nice.

– It’ll do. It’ll have to. The stone’s pretty useless…

He’s taken down an ornamental flowerbed and is re-building it against the boundary wall as a long border. That way they can get the mower in and things won’t look so fancy. Instead of marigolds and violets they’ll grow tall poppies, St John’s wort, mint and sage. Borage maybe.

– We can have lunch soon.

– OK. Bring my testing kit would you? Before we eat.

He watches her saunter back to the house, picking some leaves from the rosemary bush, rubbing them between her fingers. She’s let her hair go grey. Once it had been golden brown. But it suits her, cut close to the nape. There are buddleia flowers turning from purple to brown. A few butterflies linger there, dabbing and retreating. Cabbage whites. Peacocks. He pulls out more stone, finds snails that have died in the wall, their nacre like dried sperm.

The stone’s all wrong, river boulders that have been rounded by the current. Slabs of shale that have started to rot in winter rain. Hardly anything flat or square. It’s a bodged job. No through-stones to tie it together. He’s got a bucket filled with smaller stuff to fill in with, but it’s not the way to build a wall. There’s no rear access to the garden, no way to bring in more materials. When he’s out and about in the car and sees something suitable he stops to haul it into the boot. He’s heard of a farm worker in the next village who did that, building a house for his old age. They said he could tell where every stone came from. Every one had a story. One of these days, Zoscia says, he’s going to get caught and they’ll all end up in court. For what? And who cares? Good stone is hard to come by. It’s hardly stealing.

Zoscia’s stepping across the lawn, the muscles in her calves broad and tight. She’s bringing a tray of sandwiches now, a bottle of Pilsner, a bottle opener next to the black pouch. There’s a packet of crisps, sliced cucumber, gherkins, baby tomatoes from the greenhouse. The tomato plants are turning white with mildew. They’ll need clearing soon. Carl cracks a stone in half with the hammer and a splinter strikes his face.

– Shit!

– You ok?

He shakes the gauntlets off and kicks fragments towards the wall.

– Ach! Bastard thing!

– Come for your lunch … come on, you’re tired.

Carl walks away from his work, rinses his hands under the garden tap and dries them on his polo shirt. Zoscia watches him, a little stiffness in his movements. His hair is cropped close and his head is tanned. His stomach is still taut and lean, his legs slightly bowed. Footballer’s legs. Though he hasn’t played in twenty years. Zoscia pulls a chair away from the table for him. He sits down, letting his shoulders sag for a second, dangling his hands in mock exhaustion. His grey eyes flicker towards her. He’s still handsome when his face catches a smile.

Carl unzips the black pouch and takes out the meter. He puts in a new testing strip and sets the symbol: an unbitten apple. He fiddles a needle into the lancet, twists off the plastic cap, then shoots it against his little finger. Zoscia watches the droplet of blood squeeze out. It’s like a ruby or rowan berry. Carl touches the strip to it and the blood is drawn away.

– What does it say?

Digits are counting down from five to zero. Then a new number appears.

– Five-point-eight.

– Is that good?

– Pretty good, I guess. Anything over seven is high.

Carl shrugs and packs the kit away.

– I’ll live at that.

Zoscia takes a crisp and holds it for a second.

– Anika rang, by the way.

– What did she want?

– Just to Skype us with Michal. I said we were busy. Maybe tomorrow.

– Are they ok? She usually wants something.

– They’re fine. She said so.

Carl sucks his finger clean and for a moment they sit with their faces turned to the sun, soaking in the heat. It feels like a dimming ember, slowly sinking to autumn. Winters are cold this far inland. It’s a good feeling when the leaves fall and the days turn crisp and the lawn glitters with frost in the morning sun.

Under the table, her open-toed sandals and brown ankles; his work boots and frayed cargo pants. Against the garden wall, sunflowers, espaliered fruit trees heavy with pears and plums, a hollyhock still in full bloom. There are foxgloves everywhere this year. Bees are working the purple and white bells, crawling along the stems of lavender, brushing stamens on the ragged pink flowers of the dog rose. Their low thrumming and the clanging of the bell meld together. The partisans’ names are cut into a slate plaque with a line of poetry. Once a year there’s a ceremony with a wreath and the local scout group. It’s said the priest gave them away. But that hadn’t saved the church. The bottle hisses as Carl pours it, catching the excess with his mouth as it overbrims the glass.

Carl sits for a moment, feeling the beer cold in his stomach. Cold like metal. Then he puts the glass down and massages his neck, rotating his head from side to side to stretch the tendons. Zoscia is watching him, the way the skin tightens and slackens around his jaw.

– Is it still sore?

– It’s going to be.

She stands behind him and massages the sides of his neck and he groans with pleasure.

– You should take it easy.

– This is taking it easy.

– You know what I mean, after what happened.

Carl shrugs her off and reaches for the glass of beer. He stretches his toes and calves, sending a wave of tension through his spine. His neck still feels tight after all this time.

He’d been driving through wads of early morning mist, leaving the hotel in the company car to get to a sales meeting. He fumbled the keys into the ignition. The engine turned over then died. Carl tried again, watching white smoke fan out behind as it fired. The clutch retracted smoothly against his foot and he pulled away.

He was tired, even though he hadn’t had a drink with Jonas and the others last night. If he went to the doctor it’d mean more tests. He just needed to slow down a little. The news presenter’s voice filled the car, smooth and reassuring. Syrian refugees were flooding into Iraq; suicide bombers in Pakistan; an attack on a church in Kano. He’d been there once, before he met Zoscia, working in pharmaceuticals for a British company. It hadn’t lasted long, just three months or so. Then he’d had enough of backhanders, of never knowing where you stood. And that was just the Brits. The voice went on to the exchange rate, the FTSE 100. Then the weather, which was supposed to be mild when the mist burned away. It thinned and gathered again like cannon smoke from a movie.

Carl switched on his fog lights. Then the headlamps, dimming them as they bloomed against blank air. He drove down the slip road to join the motorway. Something moved in the corner of his eyes and he braked. A family of fallow deer crossed the road ahead. First a stag with small pointed antlers, testing the air, then a dappled doe and her foal following, stepping with dainty footsteps across the tarmac. Sometimes he surprised an early morning heron or caught a hawk working the verges. He never tired of that: nature was out there, going on despite everything. Carl watched them leave. They seemed bewildered for a moment then made a way through bushes that lined the slip road, finding a way to disappear.

Animals had senses that humans lacked. Dogs had some organ that mingled taste and smell, but was neither. Maybe deer, too. It was hard to fathom stuff like that, things there were no words for. He slipped the car into gear and pulled away, picking up speed as he swirled into sparse traffic. There were container lorries heading for the ports. Guys like him in ties and pressed shirts, risen from hotel rooms to shower and shave. Now they were moving on to the next thing, their faces grim and tight. Six-thirty. Zoscia would be just waking up now, pressing down the lever on the kitsch alarm clock that Anika had given them one Christmas. She’d be pulling open the curtains to look across the fields and they’d be lost in mist. He’d been away for three days already. One more meeting, one more PowerPoint presentation, then home to decent food, his own bed.

Zoscia lay in late, deciding not to go into the office that day. She’d work at home on her laptop. It made no difference in the end, whether you were in your office emailing the colleague next door or emailing from home. They all existed as pixels on a screen now, text messages, scraps of thought, binary code pulsing through fibre optics. Disembodied, as if their flesh and muscle and blood had been superseded. Before you registered on the system you were a non-person. Username. Password. Then you existed through your virtual self. You were your own avatar. Though that was to do with something else. Vishnu? Some god or other in human form. She pulled the sheets back and stepped into the shower, letting the water fall against her breasts and tighten them.

She could use the time she’d spend driving to the office doing jobs around the house or just relaxing, taking a few minutes to herself. She towelled herself dry and dressed in casual clothes: slacks and an old shirt of Carl’s, washed but not ironed. She didn’t bother with a bra and the soft cotton seemed promiscuous against her skin. She caught its faint scent of detergent and fresh air where it had dried on the line in the garden. When she opened the kitchen blinds the lawn was covered in bluish dew and there were jackdaws hopping across the turned earth of the flowerbeds. Beyond the garden were fields of maize and barley, cabbages spreading to the flat line of the horizon. Last year it had been sunflowers. Turnesol. The mist had almost cleared.

She made coffee, poured breakfast cereal into a bowl, plugged in the laptop at the kitchen table and piled up a stack of case notes with the report she was working on. The house was at the edge of the village and it was quiet, just the odd farm vehicle moving on the lane outside. It led nowhere, to a farm gate, to those fields of drilled crops. She ate the cereal walking barefoot on the lawn where there was no one to see her except the jackdaws squabbling in the ash tree now. The dew was numbingly cold, like needles against her toes.

Zoscia dried her feet, dropped the dishes into the sink, found her spectacles and set to work. She thought about Carl waking in a hotel room, finding a crisp shirt from his luggage, shaving, fastening cuff links, pulling the lapels of his suit jacket tight. She frowned at the dry air of a hotel, anonymous rooms, air conditioning, the breakfast queue. Malaysian and Filipino maids moving between tables in tight uniforms. The way Carl would watch them. All that smiling politeness, their real lives somewhere else.

Zoscia worked all morning, stopping for coffee and a cigarette which she smoked sitting at the garden table on the iron chairs. Her mobile rang a couple of times but she saw it was the office and let it go onto answerphone. She’d pick up the calls later and deal with them in one go. She could always blame the signal, which came and went like a ghost here. Their phones worked almost everywhere but at home. That’s good, Carl said when they found out it was the downside of their new house. No signal, excellent. Fuck them. Downside was upside. To hell with it. Peace. Until a new radio mast went up and one bar became five. Not yet. As she pulled the smoke into her lungs, she remembered her mother tying up her pigtails before she left for school. Her leather satchel with the broken strap. She was in a home now and didn’t know them. Zoscia stubbed the cigarette. She cleared the dirty cups and plates into the dishwasher and ran a cloth over the sink, spattered with coffee grounds from the cafetière.

Carl entered the main stream of traffic. The sun was trying to burn away the mist. It cast a yellow glow onto the windscreen. Each time he passed into a zone of cold air – a temperature inversion – there was a thicker band of white. The radio news was followed by one of those arts programmes where the guests had done supposedly interesting things and written a book about it. An actress writing about her father who’d been a wall of death rider; an ex-gang leader who ran an NGO in the Sudan; a mother who’d published a diary about her son’s autism. Carl switched the radio off. In the silence, he though about Anika. He thought about Michal, the smell of his baby head, his tiny fingernails, the creases in his skin. Fat thighs buttoned into a striped baby suit. The way he’d bang a wooden spoon against this highchair or patter across the kitchen floor, pulling himself upright against the fridge or kitchen cabinets. He’d be walking soon. Into the future, into whatever lay ahead.

The car appeared to glide, entering another veil of mist that thinned momentarily then seemed to clear. He’d got the climate control on so it was warm. The heated door mirrors stayed clear. Carl pressed the accelerator and gathered a little speed. The turbo was almost silent. He liked that relaxed sense of speed. The scent of leather upholstery that creaked faintly as he shifted in the seat. The leather steering wheel and gear shift. His hands were freckled, the skin softly wrinkled. But the car was almost new, renewed every three years, mocking him.

The banks of the motorway were wooded with birch trees, their pale bark spectral in the light. He thought of the deer fleeing, the little stag breaking through the trees with the foal following, then the doe. Everything in the air was a message to them, every molecule of scent meant something. There was a soft crump ahead, then the glow of brake lights through mist. Carl hit the brake and then was thrown back by the airbag as the bonnet crumpled and was flung open. Just a second later he was thrown back against the seat as a car smashed into his and then span and slewed alongside.

Carl was cursing softly. He pressed the button to open the window. Cold air. The taste of fog. Voices shouting. The smell of petrol. From behind him the squeal of tyres against a wet road, as car after car joined the pile-up. The sound of tyres and tearing metal was softened by fog. Carl needed to run, his body drenched in adrenalin, but he was afraid to step from the car. Then a woman staring in at him, shouting something over and over, blood pouring from a gash in her cheek. He felt stupid, paralysed, the airbag pressing against his face, thinking of Michal, of deer streaming through trees, panicking onto the ploughed land, their breath streaming.

The kitchen was open-plan, joined together with the living room with its big brick fireplace and wood-burning stove. The log pile was at the side of the house where Carl loved to split and stack a load for the winter, piling them in some scientific way so they’d dry in the airflow. It was a good feeling that, being prepared for whatever lay ahead. For those winter days when snow might pile against doors and windows, though it hadn’t snowed that hard for years. Mainly it was grey skies and a sniping wind that hissed over the farmland.

When Zoscia glanced up from the screen she could see through the lounge to the track outside. A tractor passed, towing a harrow. A jeep spattered in mud and dung, rocking over potholes. Someone went by on a mountain bike, passing the window and glancing in to where she was working in the shadow, behind curtains. A blue top, black shorts, grey cycling helmet. There was no through way and she wondered if they were lost. She half expected other cyclists to follow, riding in a posse, the way they did on the main road.

The lone cyclist reappeared a few minutes later outside the window, leaning his bike into the hedge, unstrapping his helmet, reaching into his backpack. Zoscia stood up, went to the window, then the door. When she opened it she saw it was a young man, thick curly black hair spilling from the helmet. He was short for a man – about her height – broad, with strong legs. His sleeves were pushed back where dark hair grew thickly on his arms. The bike looked technical, all cables and levers, like the one Carl kept in the garage with its gadgets for measuring things. She noticed that he didn’t wear a wristwatch. Zoscia smiled and he smiled back, open-faced, showing teeth that lapped over slightly at the front. His eyes were so dark they seemed almost black, the pupils absorbed.

– Are you lost? There’s no way through here.

The young man nodded and smiled and pointed to the map. It was under control, it was all in hand. He unstrapped his helmet and sat it on the saddle.

– Where are you trying to get to?

He didn’t answer but raised his head and tapped two fingers to his throat. She must have looked absent because he shook his head and made the mute gesture again, more urgently. Zoscia felt something melt. Her belly was a soft fruit, her blood effervescent, washing her away, drenching her. The dark eyes were watching her. He smiled an apology and held out the map.

Zoscia traced the route he’d taken with her finger and he showed her where he must have gone wrong. They were laughing. Standing this close, he smelled of grass and hedgerows and fresh sweat. Then he was in her kitchen drinking a glass of water. Then her hand was on his arm, brushing the dark hair. Then he was tasting her mouth, like the water, like the fruit that had seemed to melt inside her at his muteness.

Zoscia found a fresh towel and led him to the shower. When he emerged she tugged the towel away and led him to bed. His hair was tousled and wet. Zoscia guided him, his eyes widening then closing. She pulled him towards her, into her, feeling his urgency and heat, his arms still faintly damp from the shower. He was gentle as he quickened and they came together in a little tremor that she knew might be the beginning of remorse. Then they lay in a band of mild sunlight that showed up motes of dust turning in currents of air. A dog was yapping faintly at the nearest farm.

After a time he kissed her shoulder before rising to get dressed, smiling at her, pointing to where his watch should have been, that pale stripe on his wrist. When he left, Zoscia watched from the upstairs window. He looked absurd with his curls spilling, peddling down the lane towards the main road. Vishnu in a cycling helmet. Zoscia showered, then dressed in Carl’s old shirt, changed the sheets, and carried on working as if nothing has happened. She didn’t even know which language he might have spoken. She’d stroked his neck like a child’s when he came and sagged against her. She wondered when he’d last had a woman. Her phone beeped and she saw a line of messages from Carl.

Zoscia collects the plates and the beer bottle and bottle cap and glass and neatens them on the old tin tray. It’d been her mother’s before her mind had flown away. She goes to the trellis where the fruit trees are espaliered and brings two plums, dusky with bloomed yeast, and rinses them under the tap. They’re sweet and warm from the sun. Carl takes one and bites into it. She thinks of the boy’s eyes, how dark they were.

– Will you get it finished today?

Carl squirts the plum stone between his finger and thumb and it shoots into the shrubbery where verbena is fading and dropping its leaves.

– Maybe.

He’d worn a surgical collar after the crash, his neck stiff from whiplash. They’d waited in the mist, listening to what was happening on their car radios as the fog gradually cleared. Over thirty cars and lorries had piled together. No one was killed, which seemed a miracle. A white horse had galloped past them in the field beyond the hard shoulder, snorting with terror. That had been two years ago, yet his mind still went back there to the bloom of brake lights, the soft crumpling of metal, to that woman’s face, and to the deer stepping across the road as his engine panted smoke.

– What about dinner. We could go out?

– We could. Is that what you want?

They could walk to the new restaurant in the village. Paulo’s. It was owned by an Italian guy and his wife. He did the cooking and she looked after front of house. The food wasn’t bad and they could drink decent wine, find something to talk about, then walk home arm in arm. They’d pause to read the names on the war memorial, think about those three boys waiting to die, white-faced in the sun. They’d regret the new church, all concrete and stained glass. As if God would mind. The village would be settling down to sleep, curtains drawn, dogs calling from the farms. Then cities lighting up the horizon, shutting out the stars, reminding them how the world turned from sleep to waking, from waking to sleep.

– What do you think? Dinner at Paulo’s? My treat…

Carl shrugs and stands up, stretching his arms, massaging the tendons behind his knees.

– I don’t mind.

– Don’t mind?

A little cloud drifts into her face to darken it.

– I meant it would be nice.

He smiles a little ruefully and she dips her head, remembering to call Anika in the morning, wondering if Michal will recognise them on the computer screen.

– OK. We’ll go out, then. I’ll ring to book a table.

– Do you need to do that?

– Might as well be sure.

– OK. I’ll get on with this.

Carl looks to the wall he’s building. Once it’s up and planted out and the moss has grown back no one will notice its flaws. It’ll blend together with time. Zoscia lifts the tray with its glasses and plates. The bottle overbalances and she steadies it.

It would be a nice thing. Dinner, with Zoscia then the walk home, a bed made up with crisp sheets and nothing much to do next morning except a slow breakfast and the Sunday papers. Carl pulls on the gauntlets and leans down to kiss the nape of Zoscia’s neck, remembering how her hair had glowed once, fierce and tawny. Like a lion. Like a hawk. He picks up a stone and taps it into place.