Two men, watching and listening, whispering words like you and when and maybe and dunno. The men are in their twenties. Their hairstyles are heavily worked, excessively gelled affairs, swishing this way and that way like hair sculptures, super-thin matches leaning left and right, glued to impress, intended to remain in place until head hits pillow and the sculpture flattens into a dusty chaos. One man is wearing white Adidas trainers with three blue stripes, skinny red chinos, a royal-blue jumper. The other is in black jeans, a white long-sleeved T-shirt, an olive-green gilet. They are young and tense and impatient. They are livid.
“Do you think they’ve nicked them?”
“Bloody hope not.”
“How do we play this?”
“Depends what they’re like. Can’t pre-plan it.”
“Bloody hell.”
“I know.”
“This is your fault.”
“Bollocks is it. You left them here.”
“Do you reckon they’re having an affair or what?”
Miriam’s fire is dwindling. Ralph is too busy talking to notice. Dying light, tiredness setting in, it can only mean one thing—time for bed. But which bed? Miriam’s thoughts turn to practicalities and bodies and terrifying awkwardness. A man, a woman, a wooden floor. Oh dear God!
Ralph is still talking about his son, Arthur, who takes after Sadie in so many ways, what with his temper and discontentment. Miriam is saying right, oh right, he sounds a bit difficult. She thinks about running, but heading through the woods in the dark is not an inviting prospect. Who knows what’s out there? Once again there is nowhere to turn. It feels horribly familiar but it also feels different—a tiny bit exciting. Miriam can’t contain excitement, she isn’t used to it, it races all over her, makes her arms and feet itch.
“Stan’s more like me, I think,” he says, rubbing his hands together. “He’s easier to please.”
Seriously, Ralph? You think you’re easy to please? All you and Stan have in common is tidiness and excellent personal hygiene. Try harder, Ralph. Keep looking for yourself.
He glances at the sky. When he was a boy, his mother told him that every star made a different sound and when the moon was full, if you listened carefully, you could hear a big band, a raucous symphony, a love song. Brenda was drunk when she said this, drunk on Babycham (the happiest drink in the world, it says so on the label), and Frank had listened with amusement after six pints of Guinness and two packets of pork scratchings. They were celebrating again. It was their anniversary. They were checking on their son after an evening in the Bell. The stars were playing cellos and violins, piccolos and harps, an oboe and a double bass—all for the moon, the swooning moon.
“Swooning moon?” Frank said later, as he snuggled up to his wife beneath their new feather duvet, bought from Tilly’s bedding stall at the market. (“This new duvet’s my pride and joy,” Brenda had said, feeling like she’d made it to the top of a small mountain from which everything looked brighter and less daunting. “Tilly says it contains the feathers of more than five hundred ducks. Can you feel how heavy it is? Feel it, Frank. Feel it.”)
“I came over all fanciful,” she slurred, stroking his stubbly cheek.
“You’re a poet.”
“Don’t I know it.”
“You always show it.”
Brenda tried to think of another line, but it’s hard to come up with poetry when your husband has lifted up your nightie, your brand-new nightie, Cadbury purple, made of silk, bought in the BHS sale especially for your anniversary.
“Well Mr Swoon,” she said.
“Swoon by name, Swoon by nature,” he said, kissing her neck.
Ralph could hear them in the night, talking and laughing and making other kinds of noises. He looked out of his bedroom window and pictured a star playing the drums like Animal from The Muppets. It sounded good. He picked up two pencils and played along with Animal on the windowsill until his mother burst in, rosy and dishevelled, and took the pencils away. When she had gone, he got back into bed and pulled the duvet over his head. He could still hear them laughing. Their great romance, always on show. He found it embarrassing. It made him blush. His friends’ parents were irritable and tired, which was easier to be around—he could do his own thing, he didn’t have to be happy.
(The hefty shadows of other people.)
(A boy who just wanted to plant seeds.)
Tonight, in the woods, Ralph leans back and props himself up on his elbows. He looks at the silhouette of branches against the night sky.
Then he sees two figures.
Two figures coming through the trees.
Walking towards them.
Throwing torchlight all over his face and body.
Throwing torchlight all over Miriam.
Bastards.
How dare they?
Ralph and Miriam are torchlit.
Trapped.
Fuck.
Miriam gasps.
“It’s all right,” Ralph says, standing up. “It’s all right.”
Is it?
Careless words. Automatic. Placatory.
The figures are men. This much is obvious in the light of the gas lamps and the full moon. Ralph’s own torch is a few metres away. He can see it on the floor (small, silver, out of reach). The Road by Cormac McCarthy, Ralph’s favourite book, flashes through his mind. He thinks of the father and the boy, listening out for strangers in the night, strangers who want to steal their food and cut the stringy meat from their bones.
“Hey there,” says one of the men, the one in red trousers (let’s call him Red).
“How are you doing?” says the other, the one in the green gilet (let’s call him Green).
“All right,” Ralph says, trying to sound confident.
Miriam just stands there, stiff as an exclamation mark.
“Don’t worry, we’re not staying,” Red says.
“We think you might have some stuff that belongs to us,” Green says.
“What stuff?”
“Three little tins.”
“We left them in the cabin.”
The cabin? Ralph hasn’t been thinking of it as a cabin. It’s more of a hut really. A flimsy old shed. A cabin sounds too purposeful, too inhabitable.
The men walk over to it and open the door. They disappear inside, bouncing torchlight around the walls and the floor. Ralph and Miriam wait. They listen to the mumbling and the restlessness, a two-man chorus of disgruntlement. Red and Green (should never be seen) are not happy.
“Do you have the tins?” Miriam whispers.
Ralph shakes his head. “I remember seeing them.”
“Where are they?”
“I don’t know.”
“Did you put them somewhere?”
He tries to think. Yes, there were three tins. They were on the floor when he arrived. Small, faded, probably quite old, the kind of thing Sadie would buy online from a website specializing in “retro & vintage”—modern reproductions of household objects from the Fifties and Sixties, expensive tat. Come on, Ralph, what did you do with the tins? I picked them up while tidying the place—that’s what I did. Just before feeding Treacle for the first time. Are you sure? Yes, I’m sure, I can remember doing it. So they must still be in there, right?
Wrong.
Oh Ralph!
Red and Green emerge from the shed, swinging their big-man torches (shock-proof, rain-resistant—truncheons with bulbs, basically, and much manlier than their old torches, which were palm-sized, wind-up, shaped like penguins). They stole the torches from their local camping shop last week, because why spend money when you can get it for free? This is their motto, their mantra, and sometimes Green turns it into a little ditty, sings it like it’s a slogan in an advert about small crime (harmless) and real crime (capitalism).
“We have a problem,” Red says, shining his torch into Ralph’s eyes.
“No tins,” Green says.
“So where are they?”
After all the wine this evening, Miriam’s bladder feels like it’s about to burst. But this is not the time to go, and it’s not the time to cry either, she knows it’s not, so she stands up straight and looks into the light.
“I’m not too sure,” Ralph says.
“You’re not too sure?” Red says, mocking Ralph’s voice. He looks at Green, who knows what the look means. They’ve been friends long enough to read the signal for let’s do this, let’s have some fun.
“You two an item or what?” Green says.
“I don’t think that’s any of your business,” Ralph says.
“Oh really? You don’t feel inclined to answer a polite question, is that what you’re saying?”
“Well, I—”
Red looks Ralph up and down. “I don’t like you very much,” he says, taking a step closer, then another.
“Stop,” Miriam whispers.
“What?”
“He hasn’t taken your tins.”
Green looks bemused. “What’s wrong with her?” he says. “Why’s she speaking funny?”
“She said I haven’t taken them.”
Red belches. They all look at him. Miriam looks at the floor. She feels Green’s words climbing into her ears, tiny word-worms—what’s wrong with her what’s wrong with her—slithering along, oily. She forgets about her bladder. She forgets that she is afraid. A wild fury rises against Green’s words, washing them out of her ears. She clenches her fists.
“I’m crazy,” she whispers.
Ralph catches her eye.
“You’re fucking creepy,” Green says.
“Do you know what we’re doing out here?” Miriam whispers. “We’re hiding. Because of what we did.”
Red and Green exchange glances. Maybe these freaks are more trouble than they’re worth. They just want their tins. Or, to be precise, what’s inside the tins: six bags of pills and an engagement ring.
“Just give us the tins,” Red says, staring at Miriam.
“I’ll need to look for them,” Ralph says.
“So you have seen them?”
“I remember seeing them, but I had a bit of a tidy-up.”
Red grimaces. What kind of man has a tidy-up in the woods? This guy needs messing up, would probably do him good. Better be quick though, there’s a party to get to, goods to deliver, a woman to propose to with a stolen ring. The woman’s name is Janie. She is Welsh. She earns good honest money from squeezing women’s breasts into a machine that takes a photograph of their internal worlds. What’s the bloody word for it? Red grits his teeth. Come on, you’ve said it a thousand times. The effort of thinking makes him belch again, which seems to release the word from its hiding place. (Imagine what would happen if neuroscientists discovered a connection between semantic memory and burping. The sales of carbonated drinks would rocket. People with murky minds would rub one another’s backs until every trapped word burst up and out.) “Mammogram,” Red announces. Why can he never retain that word? It drives Janie mad. She slapped him once when he couldn’t remember. She slapped his face and called him stunted.
“You got Tourette’s?” Green says to his friend.
“I’ll just grab my torch,” Ralph says, edging forwards. He picks up the torch and switches it on. It’s not a big-man torch. It’s not a truncheon with a bulb.
Red rolls his eyes. “Here, use this.” He holds out his torch.
“This one’s fine,” Ralph says, with a supercilious smirk. (Why choose a 4x4 when you have a perfectly sufficient Volkswagen Polo?)
Red didn’t like that. He didn’t like the smirk. If Janie stuffed it into the mammography machine (woohoo! How’s that for a memory, eh, Janie? No link between cannabis and memory loss at all, see? I hate to say I told you so) and took a photograph of its internal world, she would find it jam-packed with condescension, and if she squeezed it, really tightened the machine’s grip, it would all come oozing out—lashings of condescension jam.
Snooty fucker, turning down my supertastic torch.
“I’ll help,” Miriam says, picking up the gas lamp.
“No, you can stay here.”
“She’s got better eyesight than me,” Ralph says.
“It’s not like you’re looking for a needle in a haystack.”
“How quickly do you want to find these tins?”
Green sighs. “Fine.”
Inside the shed, Miriam whispers her plan into Ralph’s ear. “If we don’t find the tins, I’ll freak out, okay? I’ll howl like a banshee. I’ll turn feral. They won’t stick around. No man wants his eyes scratched out.”
He isn’t sure how to respond to this.
They pick things up and look underneath them. Nothing under the sleeping bag. Nothing on the floor or buried in the pile of sheets. Ralph checks the pockets of his rucksack, which feels completely pointless, because he would never have put the tins in his bag, especially without opening them to see what was inside.
“Oh, hold on,” he says, flinching as he straightens his back. Sleeping on a hard floor for three nights has taken its toll. “The bucket.”
“The toilet bucket?” (Miriam has already familiarized herself with the blue plastic toilet.)
“No, there’s another one. I tidied some stuff into it, mainly bits and bobs. I like things to be in one place,” he says, as though she has demanded an explanation.
Now he is outside again, with Miriam close behind, with Red and Green watching as he picks up a bucket and empties its contents onto the floor: matches, travel tissues, food wrappers, disposable coffee cups, plastic cutlery, a guitar pick, a pair of headphones, four screwed-up carrier bags, a biro, three metal tins.
“Hallefuckinlujah,” Red says.
“Check inside them before you say that,” Green says.
“Good point.”
“All present and correct?” Green asks, as Red opens the tins one by one.
“All good.”
“Well, I’d like to say it’s been a pleasure,” Green says, pushing his hands deep inside the pockets of his jeans, “but it’s been a royal pain in the arse.” He turns to go. “Come on,” he says.
But Red isn’t moving. He is glaring at Ralph. “Hold on,” he says.
Ralph knows what’s coming. It’s obvious, isn’t it? Here we go—a man’s fist, or feet, God knows what else.
“Goodbye,” Miriam whispers.
Red looks at her. Weirdo. He looks at Green, can’t read his face. What is his friend trying to say? Closed mouth, tight lips, something like a sneer but it’s not a sneer. He looks a bit ill, is that what he’s trying to say?
Red has never seen apprehension on Green before, only on other people. He is lost. He needs to find Janie. Enough.
“Goodbye freaks,” he says.
Ralph cups his hands over his mouth. “Well blow me,” he says, as the men disappear into the darkness.
Miriam grabs the bucket and toilet roll and hides behind the shed.
And that’s when it hits him. How fragile they are out here in the woods. How exposed. The violence and indignities they could suffer. But is anywhere really safe? Ralph thinks of his house, how simple it would be to break in. The only difference between the woods and the house is timing. He thinks of Julie Parsley: right woman, wrong time? He pictures Sadie, Arthur and Stanley, sleeping in their beds. Hopes they are all right. Switches on his phone.
Jesus Christ, how many texts? The phone beeps and vibrates as Sadie’s vitriol floods into it. This level of toxicity could make a device explode. She has threatened to leave him if he doesn’t text back—how arrogant, when he has already left her. He doesn’t want to respond. He wants to leave her to poach in her own vitriolic juices, stew in her own bitterness, text and tweet and blog herself stupid. NO COMMENT, SADIE. His sons, however, are another matter.
—Hi Stan. Just a quick text to say I’m staying with a colleague. Mum & I not getting on too well. No need to worry will see you soon. Text if you need me. Poor reception so best not call. Love Dad xx
—About time dad! Are you leaving mum for Catrina?
—Who is Catrina?
—Oh come on. Mum says you’re with Catrina
—I don’t know anyone called Catrina. Are you & Arthur OK?
—We’re fine but mum being weird
—In what way?
—Drunk, smoking, threw dvds out of window
—Tell her to grow up x
—When are you coming home?
—Soon x
He pours water into a paper cup and brushes his teeth. He hums ‘Good Feeling’ by the Violent Femmes, not because he is cheerful and feels like humming, but because he is nervous, jittery, full of adrenalin. He is thinking about Miriam and her plan to freak out and go feral. No man wants his eyes scratched out. Was she speaking from experience? Is this something she does on a regular basis? Was he safer when Red and Green were still here? Please God don’t let her take my eyes.
Treacle brushes against Ralph’s legs. He picks her up and holds her against his chest. Miriam appears, carrying an empty bucket. She places it on the floor and stands there, fiddling with her hands. The feral woman has been replaced by a girl, her eyes sad and dull.
“Are you tired?” he asks.
“Exhausted.”
“Shall we try and get some sleep?”
“Okay.”
Old sheets on a cold floor. A single sleeping bag, unzipped and open to cover them up. Her pillow, a squashed rucksack. His pillow, a leather bag and folded cardigan. In the corner, on a chair, propped against four cans of pilchards, a torch points at the roof.
A chattering bat launches itself into the air from a woodpecker hole in a beech tree. It shrieks, flaps its webbed wings, emits an ultrasonic sound, inaudible to the human ear. Echolocation. The sound travels, ricochets off the environment and bounces back, a message in an echo, informing the bat about its position and prey. A second bat peers out from the woodpecker hole before soaring into the darkness, closely followed by another.
The chattering, the shrieking, the silence that is not silent.
A helicopter circles overhead. Louder, closer; fading, almost gone; closer again. The circles tell us that something is missing, it is still out here, undiscovered.
A tawny owl bickers over boundaries with another tawny owl. Round face, feather and bristle, a symbol of wisdom with acute hearing and binocular vision. It strains to pick up the rustle of a mouse on the woodland floor and two seconds later, swallows it whole.
“Everything sounds louder from in here,” Miriam whispers, not mentioning her rapid heartbeat or the whooshing in her ears. She has never done this before. Never been in bed with a man. Not that you can call this a proper bed—it’s makeshift, pretend, and they are both fully dressed—but proper or not they are side by side, planning to sleep, and she can feel his arm against hers. When they speak, it will be pillow talk. It’s improperly real, really improper.
“Miriam?” Ralph says.
“Yes?”
“I probably don’t have any right to ask you this.”
Oh God, this doesn’t sound good.
“But, well, I’m just curious really I suppose.”
“What about?”
“The feral thing.”
“Feral thing?”
He pauses. How to say it? “When we were looking for the tins, you said you would freak out.”
Yes I did, she thinks. I did say that. That’s quite right. It was that feeling again, that insidious feeling. It happened again.
“It was quite an unusual thing to say,” Ralph says, trying to lower his voice, wondering if she is finding it too abrasive. “The thing about scratching a man’s eyes out.”
There is an opening to another world. His words have carved the opening. Miriam can hear it in the distance, this other world: the buzz, the aliveness. There is a passage, a walkway, a crossing from one world to another. This is the intersectional moment. Take it or leave it, Miriam? Walk the same old path or do something different?
Why couldn’t I just let it go? Ralph thinks. What’s wrong with me? She was only trying to be helpful, to get us out of something—she tried to protect me, for goodness’ sake. Maybe I should have said what she said. Me, turn feral? What a joke. I’m a weed. Too polite. Lying in a filthy old shed with a stranger, prying like a shrink. I’m not her shrink, though, am I? Maybe we could become friends. Why don’t I have many friends? Would she care if she never saw me again?
Miriam loiters at the intersection. Ralph sits in his own world and turns himself into old rubbish. He advises his clients about this kind of thing, encourages them to notice the narratives they carry around, the way they diminish and judge themselves. The trick is to make the narrative conscious and explicit, that way you’re observing it, you’ve bought yourself some distance. But Ralph can’t master the trick. It’s like juggling with three balls—some people can do it, some people can’t. Ralph is no juggler. He has never been good with balls.
A passage, a walkway, a crossing. Hanging above its entrance, written in neon lights: WELCOME TO YOUR FUTURE (I’VE BEEN HERE ALL THE TIME). It looks like one of Tracey Emin’s neon signs. Miriam loves Tracey Emin. She loves the bed, the tent, the monoprints, the needlework and neon. She loves how everything is autobiography, everything is a message. Tracey Emin is not buttoned up. Like Fenella, she is a beacon in Miriam’s world, but a different kind of beacon. Tracey is a flare. A signal. And tonight that signal says GO, DO IT, TAKE THE RISK, GO ON, MAKE YOURSELF VULNERABLE.
“Ralph?”
“Yes?”
“I did turn feral once.”
Ralph lies perfectly still.
“That’s why I stayed in my house for three years.”
“You don’t have to tell me,” he says, more for his sake than hers.
“I think I want to. You’re easy to talk to.”
“That’s my downfall,” he says.
“Oh,” she says.
“Shall we have a cup of tea?”
“All right.”
A kettle whistles on a tiny camping stove. Miriam is wearing a sleeping bag as a cloak. Ralph is wearing a cardigan as a scarf.
“People think I’m cuckoo,” she says.
“I don’t,” he says.
“Don’t you?”
“No.”
“Go on then.”
“Are you sitting comfortably?”
“Not really,” he says, from a carrier bag on the floor. He crosses his legs. “But tell me anyway.”
When Miriam’s mother died, all that was found was a bowler hat, floating in the sea. Mad hatter. Jumped and didn’t swim. Sank deep, dead weight.
A bystander spoke to the police: “I saw a woman in a tweed jacket and a black bowler hat. It looked like a long jump, it really did, quite peculiar to say the least. You can imagine someone standing at the edge and stepping off, but you don’t expect to see a long jump.”
Take a running jump.
Don’t mind if I do.
Go on then.
Here I go. (Bye Miriam.)
Miriam lost many mothers that day. The mad one. The one who was sometimes nice. The one she loved, despite herself, and the one she hated. The one who provided a roof, water, food. The one who made her feel unsafe. And most devastating of all, the mother she never had—all hope of her, gone. The mothers had drowned, they were all underwater.
There was no body to cremate or bury. It was typical Frances Delaney, refusing to let anything be simple and clear. Her death is something Miriam has to believe in—an act of faith. Her absence requires as much effort as her presence. A sunken woman, mauled by sea creatures, her bones on the ocean floor. This woman couldn’t tolerate her own company or the company of others. In its rare moments, her happiness was inconsolable. Joy was wretched. Only sadness and repulsion made her feel secure—they stood by her when she hit out at them, came back when she pushed them away.
There was a poorly attended memorial service. Later, a plaque—FRANCES DELANEY, LOST AT SEA—attached to a bench in the botanical gardens.
After the service, Miriam slept for nineteen hours. She was woken by Fenella, banging on the front door.
“Are you all right? I’ve been calling you,” Fenella said.
“Sorry, I was asleep.”
“I was worried.”
“Why?”
“You looked terrible yesterday.”
Fenella made tea while Miriam took a shower. She waited in the kitchen, expecting Frances to walk in at any moment. She opened the kitchen window, walked through to the front room and opened the windows in there too. This house needed fresh air. It wasn’t dirty—no chance of that, thanks to Frances’s obsession with cleanliness—but it felt grubby somehow. Contaminated.
Miriam strolled into the kitchen, drying her hair with a towel, wearing grey cords and a maroon long-sleeved top. She looked surprisingly fresh-faced.
“I thought I’d take you out for lunch,” Fenella said. “Do you fancy walking to the pub? Are you up to it?”
“Of course.”
This was day one of Fenella’s Plan For Miriam: the PFM. Two copies had been typed, printed and laminated. Miriam’s future was shiny and wipe-clean, sturdy as a place mat. It would involve regular meals, long walks and small talk with strangers. On a Wednesday evening, Miriam and Fenella would attend a pub quiz. On a Saturday morning, they would have coffee in town. Miriam would purchase things by herself, small at first, like a croissant or some daffodils, working her way up to jeans and skirts. There would be milestones and rewards. Yoga, perhaps. Or an art class at the local college. Miriam could write the words I AM NOT MY MOTHER in buttons, sewed onto a giant piece of material. They could go on holiday, somewhere slow and easy and hot, with nothing to do but sit by a pool, read books and drink gin. At the very bottom of the PFM, two words in red: job, boyfriend. Beneath them, Fenella had scribbled a protective afterthought: but everything in its own time.
At the pub, Fenella bought Miriam a cheddar and onion-marmalade sandwich, French fries, half a cider. She revealed the PFM while Miriam was eating.
“There’s no pressure, honey,” she said, holding a toastie in one hand as cheese dripped onto her plate. “I won’t give you a hard time if you want to take it slow.”
Miriam smiled. She didn’t feel pressured. Fenella’s patience was infinite and puzzling. She ate her sandwich, drank her cider.
“Blimey, someone’s got an appetite.”
She was clearly in shock or denial. It was obvious. Fenella made a mental note and decided not to mention it. Shock and denial usually passed of their own accord, didn’t they? No need to add them to the plan (which would have been difficult, due to the lamination).
“I’m going to treat myself to a laminator,” Fenella said, eyeing her A4 plans, flapping them about, admiring their stiffness. “You can use it whenever you like.”
“Do you need one?”
“That’s not the point, really. I want one. It’s good to indulge yourself, honey. Every now and then. It’s good to want things.”
“Is it?”
After lunch, they stood outside the pub and Fenella squeezed Miriam so hard it hurt. “I’ve got to dash to Pilates. Shouldn’t really eat that much before a class, but hey-ho. Will you be all right?”
“I think so.”
“Give me a ring soon.”
Fenella jogged ahead, turning and waving before disappearing from view. Miriam strolled through the field, thinking about what she had found in her mother’s wardrobe two days ago: an old shoe box, with the words POISONOUS CLEANING PRODUCTS scribbled on the top. It didn’t contain poisonous cleaning products. It contained five letters addressed to Miriam, letters from her grandmother that she had never been given. Your letters sound a bit unusual, dear, Granny had written. Are you all right? In with the letters, an order of service from the funeral of Betty Hopkins, who had died when Miriam was eleven.
She had not moved to Spain.
She had not grown tired of her granddaughter.
She had died.
Frances Delaney was evil.
I lied, Miriam. And you swallowed my lies. You are full of them and full of me.
I hope they pick at your flesh, Miriam thought.
I will swim through your days and all of your nights.
The sky had darkened while they were inside the pub and Miriam hadn’t brought an umbrella or a coat. She quickened her pace, tried to avoid the cowpats, noticed a rabbit watching as she sprinted past. Just as she approached the kissing gate it began to rain. She stopped, looked up, closed her eyes. Let it wash away. That’s right, mother. All of it. This is Miriam speaking. Can you hear me? I don’t know how to live without you, not because you are no longer here, but because you never let me live. She ran her fingers through her wet hair, walked through the gate and on to the woodland path.
She heard footsteps behind her. Slow at first, then speeding up. A jogger, probably. About to run past.
No, not a jogger.
Miriam knew this because the feet stopped running when they were right behind her.
He put his arm around her neck.
No.
This can’t be—
Dragged her backwards. His free hand was on her stomach, her arm, her shoulder.
He dragged her across the path and pushed her down onto her knees.
It all happened so fast, the tangle of limbs, the pushing and the pulling, her chest hurt, he gripped her wrist and wouldn’t let go, he clamped her down, he was heavy, his hands all over her, pulling at her clothes until—
Miriam saw her mother, just standing there, watching.
Dripping wet.
Seaweed in her hair.
Wearing a tweed jacket, black trousers and a bowler hat.
The clothes she died in.
She was grinning.
A man on her daughter’s back and she was grinning.
Mum?
Miriam screamed.
The first scream since she was a baby.
Clouds were torn by the sound. Sky full of rags. Stories split in two. Like the story of Miriam Delaney, which ruptured as her elbow hit him in the chest and her teeth broke the skin of his left hand. She pushed herself against him, a human arch, twisting her body around, flinging her arms in all directions until they were face to face.
Then she scratched him. She cut his face deep.
Somehow she was behind him then—how did that happen?—his hands were over his eyes, her arms were a shocking necklace, her body a trailing pendant as he staggered forwards, trying to shake her off, shouting “What the fuck? Are you crazy? What the fuck have you done to my eyes you stupid bitch.”
As he span around, Miriam span with him.
You asked for this, you bastard. He asked for this, didn’t he, Mum?
(No reply.)
Mum?
(No one there.)
Miriam let go. She fell to the floor.
The man—his bloody face, his streaming red eyes—ran towards the woods.
Miriam—her bloody nails, her grazed knees—ran in the opposite direction towards town. When she arrived at 7 Beckford Gardens she opened the front door, ran inside, slammed it shut, locked and bolted it and hid in the kitchen. She sat on the floor in the corner, facing the window, holding her knees up to her chest, shaking.
She stared at the rainbow. An incongruous sky, untimely and cartoonish.
She waited for someone to come.
(Futile, hopeless.)
“I’m so sorry, Miriam,” Ralph says. He wants to hold her hand. “Did the police find him?”
“I didn’t go to the police.”
“Why not?”
“Don’t you see?”
“I was vile.”
“But—”
“You don’t understand.”
“He could’ve killed you.”
She tightens her grip around the Starbucks mug. “I might have killed him.”
“Miriam, he—”
“You don’t know what happened. What happened inside me.”
“You mean your survival instinct? Fight or flight?”
“I was dangerous. Mad. Like my mother.”
Ralph rubs his face. He is frowning, distressed, confused. “He was dangerous.”
Miriam exhales loudly. Why doesn’t he understand what she is trying to say? “I saw her,” she says.
“Sorry?”
“During the attack. I saw her.”
Ralph puts his hand on Miriam’s.
“She was smiling,” she says.
“You’ve been through too much,” he says.
“Too much for what? Nothing compared to what some people go through.”
“Were you too frightened to go back outside?”
“No.”
“No?”
“I wanted to keep people safe.”
“Other people?”
“I couldn’t trust myself around them. When I got home I felt nothing. And I mean for months. I felt nothing. It was weird, like I’d used up all my feelings at once.”
Lightning.
Thunder.
“Shit,” Ralph says, standing up.
They pick things up—bags, buckets, cups, a camping stove, a guitar, a sleeping bag, spoons, teabags, UHT milk—and put them inside the shed before it starts to rain, which it does in no time at all. Fat drops of rain, water bombs bursting, heavier than any rain over the past fourteen months (by morning it will be on the news: two months’ worth of rain in one night and more to come this evening, or words to that effect, words about localized flooding, sandbags, communities pulling together, drains unable to cope, rivers rising, cities underwater, and it’s all because of the jet stream, we blame it on the jet stream; words accompanied by shots of dogs swimming, residents sweeping sewage from their kitchens, an abandoned car that should never have been driven down that waterlogged street, pensioners being asked if they have ever seen anything like this before).
Where were you in the storm? The storm that lasted half the night before it fell silent, the storm that reappeared the following evening.
Tucked up in bed, of course. For the first part, at least. Where else would I have been? Not in a rickety old shed in the woods, with water coming in through the roof and the ill-fitting door.
“This isn’t good,” Ralph says, as water drips onto the sheet, the sleeping bag, their piled-up belongings.
They look at the roof, which is starting to bow under the pressure of this cloudburst, this deluge. Ralph grabs Treacle and holds her under his arm in case the roof collapses. He directs his torch at Miriam like a question.
“Okay,” she says, pushing wet hair back from her face. “Would you like to come to my house?”
“Is that all right?”
“Yes. Let’s pack up what you need and leave the rest.”
“I don’t need most of this stuff,” he says. “Can I bring the cat?”
“Yes,” she says, putting her bag across her shoulder, picking up Ralph’s guitar, wondering what this man is going to make of 7 Beckford Gardens with its brown and orange carpet from 1973, its cuckoo clock from 1958, its life-size cardboard cut-out of Neil Armstrong.
With a rucksack, a guitar, a bag and a cat, Ralph and Miriam head through the woods, through the darkness, their feet splashing through puddles, their clothes soaked, a cat bouncing in Ralph’s arms, their laughter turning manic as they struggle to see, their legs covered in mud as they slip and slide.
Ralph shouts OH MY GOD at the rain. Gargantuan words, wild and robust. He opens his mouth and they are launched at the world, just like that.
Miraculous, Miriam thinks. It’s miraculous.