Upon the kitchen window overlooking the garden, Fiona glimpses the ghost of her face: a reflection of a dark-eyed smudge, its features recast by worry and preoccupied by disappointment. After briefly interrogating herself on whether the expression is permanent, she angles her upper body forward to banish the apparition of the weary woman on the grimy pane. Her focus shifts to her husband in the distance, committed to a strange task before the uneven palisade of trees at the wood’s untamed border. It was Tom’s antics that first drew her to the window.
The lumpy surface of the garden already resembled a section of battlefield from the Great War. A scrap of land once subjected to obliterations and whistling impacts before returning to the wild; the craters and dugouts reupholstered by grasses, wild flowers and scrub. But between leaving for work that morning and returning home in the evening, hostilities have resumed and churn anew the soil of this no-man’s-land. Mounds of freshly turned earth molehill what was once an approximation of a lawn. Next to the patio doors, slab-stones are stacked beside two holes. A cemetery plot more than a landscaped garden.
Attending to the garden is the last job on a swelling list of renovations. They would get to it eventually. But Tom appears intent on spending his precious time and finite energy on making the garden even more unsightly.
Earlier, the tardy plumber had finally showed to begin work on the bathroom. Tom had been out. Fiona found an abrupt note trapped inside the letter flap. She doesn’t know when, or if, the unreliable tradesman will make the journey out to them again. It had taken so long to find a plumber with a good reputation at the right price. So long had they waited to be granted an audience, but Tom wasn’t here, wasn’t in, wasn’t home to meet him.
An angry builder also called her at work. He’d driven all the way out here today too, to also find no one home. Fiona called Tom twice and left two messages. He never returned her calls. Nor has he continued with the flooring. He was going to lay vinyl in their bedroom today and assured her that he’d start on the floor of the hall or living room too. But, from what she can see, he has, in fact, done nothing to the house at all today. Instead, he is doing this , like some absurd hobbyist searching for Roman coins, when he swore his sole focus would be the house until someone hired him to do something that paid.
Tom is wearing headphones and pushing a metal detector over the earth.
He hasn’t changed out of his soiled clothes from yesterday either. He put them back on for whatever he was doing in the middle of the night. Then slept in them.
His arms are criss-crossed with plasters, his hands are sooty with filth. The same hung-over expression slumps his face. She’s been looking at that face for about a week now: sagging, greyish, scored with lines. A nasty scratch crosses one eyebrow. She can see it from here. Stitches.
She’s more tired of looking at that face than at her own haggard visage.
One-handed, Tom glides the device near Archie’s grave. If he claims he is looking for buried treasure she won’t be as surprised as she should be. She is finding it harder to understand his behaviour as each day passes. Agitation gnaws his thoughts and frays his wires. He’s either manic and throwing himself at the walls and floors in a frenzy of industriousness, or he is sunk into preoccupation and muttering to himself. Or, worst of all, he is immolating in outbursts about the neighbours.
His paranoia is baffling, embarrassing. He’s not tuned into the present enough to address what lies before them. Her struggle for comprehension is becoming a failure of recognition.
Not sure I like him anymore. The flicker of thought she douses with a hiss.
She needs to remind herself that this is Gracey’s father. Needs to scratch through her memories to the safer ground of familiarity and remind herself of who Tom is. Or was, until recently.
‘Gonna help Daddy!’ Gracey dashes to the back door, then bustles through it and into the garden. She’s carrying her plastic spade they bought during the only seaside holiday they were able to afford, while saving for this house .
Feeling as if she hasn’t the strength to stop her daughter, or even speak, Fiona merely watches Gracey prance across the holes and mounds to where her father frowns, so far away, before the trees.
With Gracey gone from the room, Fiona finally starts to cry to herself.
* * *
From out of a darkness that voids the world beyond the kitchen, Tom staggers inside, his hunched shape and bearded face morose with what might be despair; a hint of savagery sharpening a stare that does not seek Fiona at the table.
Wafting around him and billowing into the barely warm room drift scents of turned earth, damp grass, the evening cold that grips and holds the garden and woods still against the earth. Fragrances they never encountered in their flat in town. Scents that position their home on the border of a wilder place, at the edge of something vast and merciless and unaware of their needs.
Tom kicks off his work boots and rests the detector against the wall. At the big sink, his blackened, prehistoric hands yank on the kitchen tap. Pipes bang then shudder. Water trickles, drip-drops. On the draining board, stained soup bowls from Fiona and Gracey’s tea remain unwashed.
Fiona’s face is bleached by the screen of her laptop, open upon the table. She might be peering into a better house from the darkness outside a bright window. An empty glass of wine idles beside her. A relic of sophistication incongruous here. A remnant from the world they left behind.
She looks like an installation, exhibited here in the centre of a dim, frigid kitchen with its sun-faded cabinets and walls black-spotted by fungus and fly droppings; this old shell from the Seventies, eager to oppress and douse the single flicker of modernity that her glowing screen represents. She doesn’t look up or greet Tom either.
‘What’s with the water?’
‘You tell me. Like that when I came in. Plumbing’s totally packed up downstairs. I couldn’t cook the bloody tea. Tom, we’re camping indoors.’
‘I’ll make some calls.’
Tom returns to the back door that he has left gaping, the thin warmth of the room already sucked out. He bends over and with an angry, tired grunt, drags a plastic crate across the peeling orange lino. Through the transparent sides of a container that, until recently, stored crockery carefully wrapped inside newspaper, a number of lead tablets are stacked like floor tiles. Wet soil and muddy sediment smears the side of the plastic box.
‘Got ’em all.’
That note of satisfaction, even triumph, in his statement provokes Fiona. ‘As well as ruining the garden, you spent four hundred quid today. Blackwood Magical Services?’
Tom can’t meet her eye. ‘I know it looks crazy.’
‘No. It is crazy.’
‘He’s helping me. Explained why everything is going wrong. For us. Here. I know you don’t want to hear it, but these … had to come up. It’s a start.’
‘Of what?’
‘A process. Things have to change. Or… He said … he said they’re curse tablets. Now, I don’t—’
She can’t stand it anymore. Her voice trembles as if she’s about to cry and that weakness only makes her angrier. ‘Curse tablets? That what you got there? Helping us, is it? You and me and Gracey?’
‘Yes.’
‘You missed the bloody plumber. And builder. You were supposed to be here. They won’t come out again! Took me weeks to find them! But I’m guessing you were shopping for a metal detector instead?’
‘It was included.’
‘Bargain! New roof included in the four hundred you spanked?’
Tom turns and punches an index finger at the wall bordering the neighbours. ‘There will be no bloody roof over our heads unless they’re stopped! They killed Archie. The fucking fence. The caravan now? What Gracey saw in the woods. The fucking fox nailed to a fucking tree. Open your eyes! And what I saw last night, I…’ He stops, lowers his voice. ‘You need to listen, Fi’. This looks insane. I haven’t lost my mind.’
Fiona gets up from the table and strides from the room, her fingers used as stoppers against tears that spout in warm springs. ‘But you lost something else today.’
When his wife has gone, Tom slumps against a kitchen unit, wipes his mouth with a begrimed hand. He stares at the crate of lead tablets, inscribed with runes and plastered with mud, and then his eyes drift to the wall they share with the Moots. So many.