‘Get David Cavendish to sign that bloody document.’ These had been Sally’s words to Bob as he leaned in close to her over the bed in the hospital room that overlooked the half-empty skip and the three-quarter-empty car park, and then she had died.
It had been a lateish life romance: a second marriage for her, a third for him. Autumn, 2018. Shedding of old leaves and skin. They’d made their mistakes and out of them, sometimes it seemed almost directly, had come what they found in their union: a harmony but not like anything either of them had pictured earlier in life when focusing on the word ‘harmony’ and trying to pin down precisely what that would look like. A harmony made of old wood and notebooks and soup and a coffee grinder and shouting at robots on the phone and rejecting what nonsense they could and pianos and keeping out of each other’s way for quite a bit of the week and car boot sales and a sheep and then two sheep when the first sheep got lonely and then three sheep just because they felt like it. He was forty-nine, she thirty-eight. He’d come to the book group that February, the first new arrival for a while, invited by Jane. It had been Sally’s turn to choose that week, and she’d opted for A Widow for One Year by John Irving. She talked about what a warm, generous, funny and sympathetically human author Irving was. Bob sat in the corner on the most important-looking chair, frowning, filling his cheeks with wine and hogging the chilli-coated peanuts. ‘He’s bland and overlong,’ he said. ‘And why do his female characters always have big tits? It strikes me he’s just writing out his sexual fantasies, getting off on his own inventions.’ She thought Bob was a ghastly grump, a withered wirebeard, a molten meanmouth, a blown fuse of predictable cynicism. He didn’t come again.
Seven months later, he crashed his car into hers at the half-blind junction outside the arts college where he went to talk about woodcraft one afternoon a week. Nobody was hurt and he admitted liability. He was so instantly attentive, so patently repentant and worried about the mistake he had made, that when he arrived at the driver’s-side window after running across the road to her from his abandoned, fishtailed hatchback, she did not instantly equate his face with the jaded peanut hogger of the previous winter, even though the mouth and eyes seemed immediately familiar. He recognised her more quickly and they exchanged details for insurance purposes but it was not until the following week that she strolled out of the wallpaper of his days and became lifelike. That was in the garden centre. The nice one, with the mossy hanging baskets and the old man with the calculator. Not the big one, with all the weedkiller and all the screens that barked at you to buy stuff that would change your life as a gardener. He had his headphones on, was half-listening to a podcast about the building of early tanks and wondering why ferns were so expensive when you could just find them everywhere in the countryside around here anyway, when he realised a woman was staring at him, mouthing a word, over and over again. He removed the headphones. ‘Car, car, CAR!’ she said. And now he saw her. He saw empathy and rain and second-hand wool and an excellently cantilevered nose and forbearance and independence refusing to transmute into misdirected fury. He helped her transfer the Trachycarpus she’d purchased to the boot of her car but he got the angle wrong and one of the branches snapped. By way of apology, he bought her carrot cake at the tea room next door. Here she began to learn that what she’d met seven months earlier had been not so much a man as a set of trying recent events: a winter where he’d been assailed by a lost job and a lost parent, the last one he had. Things were slowly improving for him now. His time was divided between various endeavours involving wood. He had found the time to read four more John Irving books since February. He’d thoroughly enjoyed three of them.
Who even was that goblin who’d sat in the comfiest armchair in Jane’s living room back at the beginning of the year? Bob’s face had softened unrecognisably since then. She sometimes even forgot he had a beard and certainly forgot that beard looked like grey wire, even though it did. As they became Sally and Bob – always Sally and Bob to all who knew them, never Bob and Sally – she was the one who often had to step in to stop him trying to do too much for others, to stop his gentle surface being trampled on. Back then she was in the cottage in Underhill with the piano, and he was in the long house on the hill five miles away, behind the wall, with the town address even though it was outside the town, and outside the town’s mains drainage network. He only rented a fifth of the long house, and a small courtyard adjoining it, which was a shame, because a colleague at the college had recently offered him a rescue turkey and he’d had to reluctantly say no due to space limitations. His house was an afterthought on the end of the long house, like something the long house had been meaning to say to support an argument but couldn’t be bothered to properly articulate. Its windows never seemed quite right. Newts came in through the tiny lean-to in early spring, the side of the house which had, two centuries before, been the site of a large natural pond. The other four fifths of the building, and a couple of acres of adjoining land, belonged to Anita and Jac, a couple in their thirties. Bob never asked what Anita and Jac did for a living but he fed their pigs and chickens and cats while they were away, which was often, and took delivery of their online shopping packages, which were countless. When they were home, he listened uncomplainingly through the walls to their shouting matches, their reconciliatory humping, their unrelaxing Ibiza chillout albums, Jac bashing his drum kit in their conservatory and the piercing garden tantrums of Sorrel, their toddler.
Bob had only ever spoken to Jac in person once, which was not long after he’d first moved in, when Anita had invited him in for a coffee, and Jac had arrived home from work – whatever that was, something property-related, Bob tended to assume – and said, ‘Anita, what is this strange man doing in my kitchen with you?’ which was presented as a joke but also revealed itself, via its tone and Jac’s face, to be very much not a joke too. Sally said she thought they were prize nobheads. She was vocally uninhibited during sex and they’d only done it twice when the first text message from Jac arrived on Bob’s phone. ‘Dear Bob,’ it read. ‘The walls are very thin here and I hope you know we can hear everything.’ Bob did not reply and, for fear of embarrassing Sally, did not show her the message for a long time, nor Jac’s second one, but did suggest sleeping in the spare room when Sally stayed over, for a change of environment, and because it could be argued that the mattress was more comfortable. The following week, Bob took delivery of the high-end drone Jac and Anita had ordered from the Internet and placidly took it over to their house when they returned from their latest international city break. The week after that, he transferred his half of the fee for the emptying of the septic tank shared by the two houses. Bob wasn’t quite sure what went on with Jac’s phone along the way but from what he could work out Jac must have had two different Bobs saved in the Contacts section of it and they had somehow got mixed up, without Jac yet cottoning onto this mistake, so by the time four more months had passed, and Bob was out of the house and into his new place, his thread of text messages from Jac read as follows:
Jac: ‘The walls are very thin here and I hope you know we can hear everything.’
Jac: ‘Bob. Please can you transfer your half of the fee to our account that you owe us for the clearing of the shared septic tank yesterday. Your share comes to £68.50.’
Bob: ‘That should be in your account now, Jac. All the best. Bob.’
Jac: ‘The walls are still very thin, Bob. Please can both of you be more considerate.’
Jac: ‘Happy New Year, Bob. I hope life is treating you well. Please could I get eight bales of straw from you?’
Jac: ‘Howdy, Boberino. We are in dire need of manure. Can you help? Take it easy, man. Jac.’
‘Fucking hell,’ said Sally, when Bob finally showed her the messages. ‘Also why can’t he spell his name with a “k” like a normal person?’ They were in Bob’s new kitchen. Water was all over them in every way except the way that would have made them wet: the kettle boiling, the cold tap running in an attempt to stop Bob’s eyes stinging from the onions he’d just chopped, and a further, more captivating liquid story being told just outside the window. He lived by the river now, just under an hour’s walk from Sally’s, and he normally did walk, not drive there, arriving in mud-splashed trousers after cutting through woodland where fallen trees often blocked the path and the ground sucked thirstily at his legs. The front door to Sally’s cottage led directly to the living room and if you had a bit of a belly, as Bob did, it was a squeeze to get yourself through the gap between the Kentia palm and the piano. The piano, a Bechstein which had once been her granddad’s, wouldn’t fit through the door so when she’d moved in it had meant getting permission to go through the Dawsons’ garden, four doors down, then using the ginnel that led behind all seven gardens on the cottage row. The removal men had not been pleased and she gave them a £50 tip, which had left her £371.23 overdrawn, rather than just £321.23 overdrawn. Sally rarely played the piano any more as tuning other ones all day could drive her what she called ‘a bit doolally’ and she had come to appreciate the opportunities for silence that home offered. Even though her business name, Sally the Piano Tuner, made matters fairly explicit, people still often expected her to be a man when she arrived at their house to tinker with their instruments, or much older than she was, or blind, or all three. ‘So what do you do as well as this, for your actual job?’ some of them asked. They found it strange, almost impossible, to believe that this is what she’d been doing for a full-time form of income since she left college. The job was not the quaint and refined Victorian existence she had imagined when she was younger. It could be territorial and shady. When she’d first moved to the area and tried to build up her clientele, rivals in the trade had badmouthed her temperament and stability as a tuner. One especially vindictive veteran had sent her a warning message by calling her out to a fake job at a fake address. As she attempted to solve the musical jigsaws in front of her at the houses of lonely men, she saw their desperate staring reflections in the polyester finish of the pianos. But there were still moments that made the job worthwhile. Old people, hearing her play dusty instruments that had not been touched for decades, burst into tears as they were sucked down tunnels into parts of their past that had been inaccessible to them for many years. The terminology of the trade never fully ceased to provide some level of amusement for her, although most of that was now her amusement at witnessing the reactions of others when they heard it. ‘If you are lucky, I will show you my papps wedge,’ she told Bob the first time she invited him over.
Now the legal matters relating to his father’s death the previous winter had been finalised, Bob, with four or five dollops of luck and an immense amount of effort, had been able to buy the house by the river. To scrape the last bit of funds for his deposit, he had sold his furniture, his car and his record collection. Getting to the college to teach his class meant an hour’s walk and a half an hour bus ride. For extra money, he took a job helping out at a woodyard, which was also not a short walk away, and felt like work more suited to someone two decades his junior, but he enjoyed its noises and smells, and it came with the advantage of free firewood. The first time Sally came over to the river house, they ate risotto beside the crackling logs, he squatting on the floor and she on a large cushion next to an ancient hi-fi unit. She heard a discrepancy in the toner arm of the deck and adjusted it. ‘I think I might be becoming an interior decor commitmentphobe,’ he told her. He said he liked the minimalism of the house, the sense of possibility the bare rooms offered, and enjoyed the way his three remaining LPs sounded in the empty rooms, but she saw him wince and hold his side as he got up to take the dishes to the kitchen. The next time she arrived, she brought a Lloyd Loom chair. ‘But that was your mum’s!’ he said. ‘You can’t give me that.’ She told him to call it an indefinite loan. On each of her next seven visits, she brought houseplants, so now it was a house of plants and a chair. He slept on a mattress and said he failed to see the point in bed frames, argued the case against them vehemently, even as he struggled visibly to pull himself upright. She worried about what he was doing to his back, carrying and splitting logs three days a week. She recommended a chiropractor – a haunted-looking man whose practice was based at the top of a haunted-looking building in the nearest big town – and, with some coaxing, he booked an appointment. In spring she filled the balcony with pot plants and Bob moaned that it ruined the view and diminished seating potential, but he nurtured each plant, inside and out, as if it were his own child, cooked every recipe she gave him, read every book she recommended, making notes as he went so he could give her feedback. He was the first man who’d ever listened to her.
The river house did not have a garden but when the water level was low Sally and Bob crossed the stones and sat on the opposite bank in the field belonging to the farmer David Cavendish, who didn’t seem to have much use for it himself. It was a very steep field, which, when the mornings were misty and Bob looked out of his studio through the diagonal skylight, could give him the impression that roe deer were bounding through the sky. The hearing of the sky deer was so sensitive that even the sound of Bob reaching into a bag of chilli-coated peanuts, a hundred yards away, behind glass, would startle them, but soon they became more at ease with his presence. Formerly, a horse called Edna had lived in the field and chomped apples off the branches of the old tree at the field’s centre. The tree was still there and it was not unknown for apples to cling to its branches until January. Edna had died way back in 2003 but Sally and Bob often speculated about her personality and the ensuing one of her ghost. Their conclusion that she was a very strict and disapproving horse became a running joke between them.
One day in summer 2019 a night of hot rain arrived, the river filled up with voices and Bob – unable to sleep – stood on the balcony naked for half an hour taking great pleasure in letting the full force of the saturated night hit him.
‘Goodness!’ said Sally. ‘What on earth must Edna think of you now?’
The reason Sally and Bob knew about Edna was because they’d been told about her by Fleur, whose family the horse had once belonged to. Fleur was the one who’d sold the little river house to Bob. It was because of Sally’s work as Fleur’s piano tuner that Bob found out about the house being for sale and was able to buy it before Fleur decided to advertise it with an estate agent at a price Bob could not have afforded. Sally continued to tune Fleur’s piano – even though she suspected Fleur didn’t use the piano between each tuning, and asked her to tune it mainly because she enjoyed the company – and Fleur became a close friend of hers and Bob’s, telling them stories about what life was like in the river house during the previous century, when Fleur’s mum, Daphne, had lived there. Fleur called Daphne ‘an indomitable woman’ and ‘Queen of the Combe’. The Cavendish family owned the field back then too, but allowed Daphne to keep Edna there. During this period, Daphne, who abhorred slothfulness, would ring a bell at half past six every morning to make sure everyone who lived in the other five cottages on the lane was awake. Fleur said that back then the combe was mostly home to alcoholics, that something about the way the light leaked grudgingly down into it sent people organically in that direction. When Daphne died, just a week after Edna, Fleur went to live in the river house for a few years but found that the noise of the water got inside her mind and began to play tricks on it, so she let it to tenants for several years before selling it to Bob. ‘It can be a dastardly, opinionated beast,’ she said. ‘The river, I mean, not the house. The house does not force itself on anyone. It allows you to live the way you want to.’
Fleur had been correct. Bob lived in the house pretty much the way he wanted to, which was to say that after a while he lived with three chairs, fourteen houseplants and a table. There was never a time in any of the rooms when he couldn’t hear the river, unless he had one of his three remaining LPs playing loud, and on spring nights when Sally stayed over and she and Bob sat up in bed, it often felt like having a conversation in a quiet annexe of a party, next door to a room where a bigger, noisier conversation was going on. Sally, especially, was attuned to every change in the current and flow, every small rise in the water level. In bed at night with the lights off, as they half-listened to the river’s hot takes and counterpoints, she often had a lot to say and he’d keep pushing sleep away in order to hear it. When she finally dropped off, it was like a switch had been flicked – she described it that way herself, but said ‘like a flick had been switched’ because she had not fully woken up – and then, having pushed sleep away for so long and missed his chance for it, he’d be alone, stranded with his thoughts. He noticed she often slept with her arms folded, as if waiting for a dream to impress her. After a year, he knew everything about her except the trimmings. He knew that she had lupus but didn’t like to tell people about it and enjoyed bananas when they had gone a bit bad and never stood on manholes and that her parents had both been music teachers and played in the West Newcastle Symphony Orchestra and that they had twanged door handles when she was little and asked her to identify the musical note they made. He knew about all her previous romantic partners, about Jake the narcissist web designer who now lived in Seattle, about Ben who cooked extraordinarily well but slept with her best friend when she was twenty-one and about Michael who had amazing hands and taught her to use his own unique non-standard tuning on the guitar but didn’t like putting his cock inside anything or anyone. He knew where each of the four notable scars on her body came from and why and precisely which month in which year in which century they occurred. He knew that she did not believe in ghosts but was also adamant that one otherwise silent December day, when she could see the fog settling over the tor through the cottage window, she had heard her piano play two notes all on its own. He knew it all but it did not stop him loving every octave and quaver of her voice and eagerly awaiting what she had to say every time she opened her mouth.
By contrast, she sometimes felt she knew too little about him. His attitude was that his previous relationships had no place here in the present. They were like statues from previous centuries: they had been erected for old reasons, in a different cultural and political climate, and you wouldn’t want to drag them to a new place and erect them for the same reasons now. She accepted his reasoning, even though it meant she had to guess at some of the shapes of who he was and what was behind them. She knew he was northern, like her, but his northernness was more of a rumour embedded deep in him: seven years living up in Southport, from birth. She knew he liked wood and worked with it but it was only when she asked him what the strange T-shaped object with the redundant rusty hinge in the window of the upstairs toilet was that she knew he made things for his own pleasure out of it, too: useful things, like lamp bases and mirrors and coat racks, but truly odd things too, things from another dimension. She knew the job he’d lost the winter he met her had been as a lecturer in Film, but it wasn’t until they’d been together for close to two years that she discovered he also used to go into London to review movies for a magazine, one she used to buy.
‘No way! I probably read your stuff!’ she said.
‘Oh dear,’ he replied. ‘I’m sorry you had to go through that.’
He talked about the jaded newspaper critics at the screenings in Soho who would sigh and say ‘Oh, not another film’ as if they were stacking corned beef on supermarket shelves rather than being employed to do something others gladly handed over their wages to do every weekend, and about the quite famous one who fell asleep on Bob’s shoulder, and about the time Bob invited his music journalist friend Martin to a screening and Martin turned up late, still drunk from the night before, and, struggling to adjust his vision to the dark screening room, sat on the lap of a well-known radio presenter, spilling the presenter’s yoghurt, or was it ice cream. There were usually sandwiches and crisps laid on by the PR companies before the screenings but the famous radio presenter always brought his own yoghurt or ice cream tub and noisily lapped up the contents before the film started.
‘You don’t mean Irish Martin who lives in Barnstaple? The one you said you never see any more because he’s a recluse and just stays in his room meditating and chanting all day?’
‘Yes. That Martin. He’s not Irish, he just kind of… seems it. We met in London. He used to get me into gigs for free. He’s… different now. He wrote some books. He hasn’t been able to get most of them published, though.’
When Sally looked at the facts of Bob from a distance – the north-west childhood, the brief media career, the love of wood, the uncomplaining ability to be outdoors in all weathers, the grumpy resistance to change, the attentiveness to everything she taught him, the skill with his hands, the inability to detect when washed clothes were dry with those very same hands – it never seemed to quite make sense. But when he was in front of her, as Bob, real lumpy three-dimensional Bob, he made total sense. Nothing had ever made more sense to her. The following year – the first of the pandemic years – they decided she would move in to the river house with him. The national lockdowns gave them the extra nudge they needed. That, and the day a man who had asked her to tune an early 1900s Broadwood accidentally locked her in his house when he went out to work and Bob had to drive over and rescue her. Not that she needed a hero, but she looked at him a bit differently after that day, felt she was standing half a stride closer to him. In the car on the way home, she noticed a shard of glass was still sticking out of the t-shirted arm he’d used to smash the window. She carefully picked it out as he steered. She said the living room with the piano had been full of clocks, all set to different times, and their chiming had made tuning almost impossible. ‘Still,’ she said. ‘At least I got to work on a Broadwood. Those things are rare.’ He said they used the wire from them to make planes in the First World War. ‘Now how in god’s name did you know that?’ she asked. He told her he’d read it in one of her books one time when she was asleep.
She brought her piano with her to Bob’s. The removal men managed to get it in through the doors of the small light room on the end of the house nearest the lane without anybody wanting to murder anyone with knives, and there it would have to stay, which meant the room couldn’t be used for much else, but that was fine, because there were more places to sit, especially now she’d brought her furniture with her. Outside the world seemed to be ending. That’s what people kept saying. In less than a year ‘dystopian’ had become such an overused word to have been rendered near-meaningless. Early hopes when the pandemic first hit that nature was ‘healing’ had turned on their head and it appeared that in fact the virus was on the side of greed and destruction after all, annihilating all that was small and true and firming up the grip megalomaniacs and madmen had on the planet, in an attempt to push us more quickly towards the abyss. Social fissures spread out in all sorts of unanticipated ways. Making snap judgements online about the lives and personalities of people you’d never met had already been a fashionable form of stupidity for quite some time, but now it became an international sport. Fear leaked while people weren’t looking, crept through tiny gaps under doors and puddled. ‘It’s scary out there,’ people said. ‘Stay safe.’ But much of the time it felt like the problem wasn’t out there at all, it was in there, in the screens that everybody carried with them everywhere they went and nobody could stop looking at. Out there, David Cavendish had let twenty-four new sheep graze the field over the river. Out there, in the sky above the combe, there were marsh harriers and deer. When Sally and Bob stepped out onto the balcony and looked into the water, they did not see disposable masks and hand sanitiser bottles floating over the rocks. The air felt clear and quick and kept both of them looking six and a half years younger than they were. At night, during the hard pandemic winter, when everything accelerated, they did shiftwork spooning each other – four minutes each, then the changeover – and got no firsthand experience of the ache for physical affection that was pulsating in the chest of unattached people the world over, spreading like a pandemic within a pandemic. They existed in a little bubble of OK, and, as guilty as they felt about that, knowing the really calamitous state of everything, they protected the bubble fiercely, and would not have wished to be anywhere beyond it.
And now it was twenty-two years later and she was two years in the grave – or technically not in the grave at all, but in the earth, certainly, by now – and he was seventy-three and the world was not yet quite over. He had become the dropout he hadn’t quite been able to commit to becoming when he was a young man or a middle-aged one. It was easier now to do it, and harder, because every bit of alleged progress in society always made everything easier and harder. When the visors came in, he refused to have one fitted, and that made it simpler than it ever had been to step outside of it all, with no half-measures. No rudimentary pay-as-you-go phone. No Gmail address he begrudgingly checked once a week. Nothing. He was in the minority as a result of his choice to live visorless, but he was not alone. It made him part of the Resistance and the Resistance made ways for themselves to exist on the cultural borders: they opened small shops, supported one another by sharing produce, lived in their own voluntarily insular way. The fact that the mortgage was now paid off made it more possible to live as part of this section of society, as did his choice to heat it solely with wood, to insure nothing in it and to plant a little veg in the field over the river every spring, to no longer travel abroad or drive. He was living in one of the easier places to be an outcast and it permitted him to not think much beyond the ensuing twenty-four hours in his immediate surroundings. There was no point. Everyone knew the state of play now, the chorus of denial of two decades ago had fizzled down to a low hum, and, while plenty was being done to stop the acceleration into the void, the two major obstacles standing in the way – corporate greed, and the illusory drive towards convenience – could not be circumnavigated. The planet as it had been known for the last few thousand years would end soon. It would end after Bob ended, but not long after. So in the meantime what you did was grab the good days with both hands.
In truth, he had become very unaware what was going on, in a wider sense. That was the choice he had made, in an era of infotainment tyranny. He rarely had any interaction with the people with visors, who remained plugged in. Vague bits of news drifted his way via encounters on footpaths and in the community shop and the free pub: the evacuation of west California, a few encouraging advances in sustainable building regulations, the closing of the French border, war across most of Eastern Europe, Shropshire drowning under deeper water every winter, a plan for the redistribution of wealth and second homes. But it was all a muddle, factoids spinning like dust in sunlight. It was a decade since the visors came in, thus a decade since he had switched on a machine to consult a news source. His news sources were the moor and the river, but they were reliable messengers, in their own way – perhaps no less reliable than anything else. During a long walk he passed the reservoir a couple of miles north of home and noticed a bridge in the clouds a few miles north west of that and realised they were rebuilding one of the old branch lines. When there was a storm now, it crackled with more electricity. Microwaves and multisockets and chargers in people’s houses blew up, which made him even more glad to have none in his. Always prone to tempests, the river now had that bit more to say when it was incensed. He put his faith in the tiny seventeenth-century bridge behind the house. The water level had never risen high enough to overflow the mossy stonework but the December before last it had come close. The dog had still been alive back then, Jim, a Patterdale he and Sally had taken off Sally’s cousin Beth when Beth moved to Ireland. Around 2 a.m., with a whimper and a nose forced into Bob’s armpit, he had raised the alarm. The water had been steadily rising for hours, on a day of the most persistent rain imaginable which followed several days of other rain that by any normal standards would also have been classed as extremely persistent. Bob had never heard the water scream louder than just before he went to bed that night, as it raced past the living-room window, but by the point, four hours later, that Jim stood on the bed, nudging him awake, the noise had pinned the whole house in a headlock. It was not unusual for Jim to ask to be let out for a slash at this time but when Bob went downstairs and opened the back door, the little dog just looked up at him in terror. It was clear what Jim thought, which was that there was a huge monster outside, and he was not wrong. Bob could just hear a higher note within the water’s experimental dirge and realised the piano was vibrating. He went out and stood on the balcony. The writhing white shapes beneath him looked like livid swimming ghosts: all the river’s dead, raised in fury, on their way to the sea to seek the most terrible revenge. The water would have needed to rise another three feet to reach the balcony, but he had never felt more expendable. Within the white bar of howling sound, he could hear the grinding of the boulders on the river bed, as the current forced them against one another, again and again.
Since that night, he often wondered what would be the first to go: the bridge, the planet, or him. He decided that if the bridge did go, it probably meant the planet was going with it. And if the bridge went, it meant the house would almost certainly go too, and, since he went out increasingly rarely these days, it was highly likely he’d be in there at the time. He could think of many worse ways to die. It would also save him from the Alzheimer’s that had taken his dad, which he increasingly worried was his fate.
Today, though, the river was a pussycat. It purred around the boulders beneath his feet. The water level was low enough for him to plot a route across the bendy line of stones to the field in summer shoes and barely get wet. The deep pool, up by the bridge, where he sometimes spied trout, was mild phosphorescent green. Through the hole where one of the planks of the balcony had rotted, he could see a leftover semicircle of peel from the orange he’d eaten yesterday, gyrating behind a rock, the current not strong enough to wash it away. How much citrus had he thrown in here over the years? And what of the rest? The ash from the fire, the rotten lettuce leaves, the nail and beard clippings, the curdling hummus, the avocado skins, the peanuts, the matted dog hair, the garlic skin that flew away on the breeze like the butterflies Jagger released into the crowd in Hyde Park in the year of Bob’s birth? Of all the river’s dark magic, its repeated vanishing acts were perhaps its most impressive. Again and again, that crystal-clear current renewing itself, making things that had existed not exist any more. This story had been going on a long time and it never stopped, still went on down below, even on the rare occasions the surface iced over. When he died, he would be part of this story, one of the water’s innumerable voices, and nothing more. He had no children or grandchildren. His cousins Rachel and Sheila up in Stroud stopped getting in touch around the time the visors came in: they had not joined the Resistance. Martin in Barnstaple, whom he’d only seen a couple of times a year anyway due to all the chanting and meditating, had met a Hungarian lady – a songwriter – and moved with her to a house on the great plains in her homeland. He’d written Bob a letter to say the place was disturbingly flat but the sex and music were excellent, but that had been over a year ago. There was Sam, the young ecologist from the village he sometimes walked with, who quizzed him for moorland knowledge, who would remember him for a while, he supposed. But Bob’s stamp on the earth would soon fade, his sculptures remaining for a while in the houses of the people who’d bought them and then in other houses and then in dusty shops and then in other houses but with nobody who owned them having a clue about the person who made them. He would just be part of the river’s story, just like Fleur – now five years dead herself – and everyone else who’d lived on its banks, including Edna, and Edna’s tree, and that was fine, because life wasn’t about what happened when you were no longer alive, it was about grabbing the good days with both hands, and probably always had been.
It seemed very likely that the tree, in fact, might even go before him, the bridge and the planet. It leaned at a twisted rheumatoid angle now, almost painful to look at, no longer yielding apples, thrashed and browbeaten by storms. It was an incongruous gothic leper on a frivolous spring day like today. Just below it, Bob could see something else incongruous: some new low wooden posts with string tied between them, stretching up the valley. He’d first spotted them about five days ago, although he’d not seen who had placed them there. They bothered him, bothered him probably more than anything else in his life that was currently bothering him, more than the pain that diagonally knifed from his left hip to the middle of his back more obnoxiously every morning when he got up, more than the fact that when Sam had come over for a cup of coffee last week to talk about some rare beetles he was researching Bob had entirely forgotten his name for two whole minutes.
Not for one day since Sally’s death had Bob not thought about her final instruction to him. Leaning over the bed and putting an ear to her mouth in that wretched room which said nothing about the life she had lived, he had not been surprised that she had not said ‘I love you’, since she had not said that for a long time. But the vehemence and volume of the request, more of an order than a request, the ‘bloody’, the clarity of it, after weeks of no clarity at all, took him aback. It was a subject she’d not mentioned for years. He’d supposed she was thinking about his own welfare, wanting to know he’d be OK and have the best possible life without her, but more recently, when he thought about it and tried to coax himself into action, it was her interests he felt he was acting on, not his own. It was just a field; looking at the way it changed from season to season, growing produce in it, reading in it, seeing animals mooch about in it, all enhanced his day-to-day existence, but who cared who really owned it? That was his take on it a lot of the time. But then he remembered her face, the last time he ever saw it, tasted the texture of her words in his head. It was several months since he’d last been up to the Cavendish farm, which was barely a farm at all now, and spoken to the younger David Cavendish about the field. Nothing concrete had come of it, just as it hadn’t the time before. These new posts and string, though, nudged him into action. He would head up there again; not this afternoon, maybe not tomorrow, but certainly the day after. He would be firmer and stronger this time, even though there were few prospects he relished less.
Bob had never been sensible or strategic or cautious with money. He’d always known this fact about himself somewhere deep down but he knew it a whole lot more after she moved in. Although neither of their incomes had increased, a year after she came in on the mortgage, a year after they pooled their resources and she made some little adjustments to all the baggy parts of his administrative life, they suddenly felt better off. They had stopped seeing David Cavendish, or his sheep, in the field across the river by then. Bob knew how much she loved the field and, as a surprise, for her birthday the following year, he took out a loan and made David Cavendish an offer for the land, which, after some wrangling and vagueness, Cavendish agreed to sell for £68,000. Sally was furious at first when he told her, then a little happy, then furious again, when she found out that Bob had paid Cavendish for the field but not received any form of legally binding document as proof.
‘So you just… shook hands on it?’ she said. Her face had that heavy-lidded, burdened look it got sometimes. She’d just got back from a hammer recentring job and had been reaming flange bushings all afternoon. Tuning the piano they belonged to had then been made near impossible by three toddlers divebombing each other on a giant beanbag in the adjoining, doorless room in front of a blaring television. She had no idea if the piano was in tune when she left.
‘Well, essentially, yeah,’ he said. ‘It’s fine. I am sure he’s not going to diddle me. It’s different here on the moor. There’s an ancient code of honour. If somebody fucked somebody over in that way, everyone would know about it.’
‘You are insane, and you need to get in touch with a solicitor as soon as possible. Will you promise me you will do that?’
‘I promise.’
‘Next week?’
‘Yes. Well, soon.’
‘Next week.’
But next week had come and gone, then next month, then next year, and next decade, and he did not get in touch with a solicitor. The intention was there in his mind but also in his mind, every morning, was the question ‘What exactly do you want to do with this, your one precious life?’ and the answer to that question was never ‘Paperwork and time-consuming back-and-forths with a member of the legal profession.’ She continued to harangue him about his neglect of the matter for a short period but then she seemed to forget, and realising she’d forgotten was one of the outstanding reliefs of his recent life. He felt like a child who’d been forgiven for burning down a school. The field was effectively theirs anyway. They grew sweetcorn and carrots in it like it was theirs, sunbathed in it like it was theirs, grazed three Herdwicks – not for meat or wool but just for the sheer joy of letting them be Herdwicks – in it like it was theirs, erected a marquee in it for her fiftieth birthday like it was theirs. What difference did a piece of paper make? Every so often, Bob would bump into David Cavendish on the lane, and on approximately one in three of these occasions would ask him if he might be able to sort some official documentation, and Cavendish would promise to do so, but also somehow manage to convey that none of it really mattered, even the money itself didn’t even matter, even though it was now safely in one of his three savings accounts; what mattered was the sun and the air and the birds and the day, on which latter point Bob was definitely in agreement about. Sally said he was a feckless man and a royal bullshitter. She said she had become better at spotting those as she got older, and happier to confront them. Cavendish’s son, also called David, reared and shot pheasant, annihilated foxes for fun. Once on the lane when he almost drove into the side of her, she called him a cunt for it, and for his driving. Her argumentative streak – though rarely aimed at Bob – had grown in middle age. When she hit the menopause, her hair greyed and thinned, then stopped greying and got thicker, thicker than it had been since she was a teenager. She attributed this to her argumentative nature. She said it was her hair’s way of disagreeing with what biology had planned for it. It became the first way that people recognised her, made her bigger and more impressive in the eyes of people they knew, made them even more Sally and Bob, even less Bob and Sally.
*
The river changed colour again over the next two days: heavy cool spring rain turned it the colour of beer, foamed up its margins. He sat out at dawn hoping to catch sight of otters. More had been spotted over the last few years, especially a mile or so upstream where the combe’s steep walls of moss closed in and only allowed in secret sharp flashes of light. Two summers ago one of them had made off with a cod that Patrick and Mel at Russet Cottage had left exposed, marinating in honey and soy sauce on their kitchen table with the French windows open. He thought he saw one today but it was a false alarm: just a squirrel, skipping over the rocks, out of its element. He went inside and showered and put on his lone clean pair of trousers and ironed shirt. He resented himself slightly for doing it but decided it was wise not to add any element to his appearance that would put him at risk of being taken less seriously during the day’s central task. Before he left for the Cavendish place, he mopped up the water droplets from the bathroom floor: an old habit, not quite yet dying its hard death. Sally had been an alarmingly splashy bather and in two years he had still not got used to living with a largely dry bathroom. He had never quite worked out what she did to make the floor and walls so wet. When her hair got bigger, it only made the explosion of water more exuberant.
Out on the lane, the hedgerows were settling into their high spring colour scheme of white, pink and blue: greater stitchwort, red campion and bluebells. Two decades ago the lanes had become quite dicey to walk along due to a combination of angry drivers living in a pandemic, population growth, urban exodus and people texting at the wheel. It all felt like it had been leading to a kind of breaking point. The work of the second and third pandemics and the rise of self-driving vehicles had altered that. In a climb of just over a mile, he saw nobody. He took a left at the top of the hill, past a half-demolished stone barn with a corrugated iron roof reddened with rust, then turned up the track leading to the farm and pressed the intercom. He found David Cavendish – the second David Cavendish, or rather the fifth, and second most recent, David Cavendish, if you were looking at the entire timeline – on the porch, in the middle of an animated conversation with an unknown, invisible entity. Cavendish acknowledged Bob with something not totally unlike a smile, using the small part of his face that wasn’t absorbed in whatever was being fed to it through his visor. His head, though bald, looked smooth and youthful – certainly no older than his age, which Bob knew to be somewhere in his late thirties – but underneath it his body resembled eight or nine assorted pumpkins on the turn, stuffed into some cloth. Bob immediately felt mean for having this thought – after all, he’d let himself go a bit in middle age, too, before his exit from digital life – and it was up to individuals how they looked after their own bodies, and nobody else’s business, but he had heard the rumours about what these visors were doing to people, about the so-called ‘ultraworld’ they lived in, where the virtual body they modified had superseded the physical one they still put food and drink into and walked around in and shitted and pissed out of. When they had to live fully in their physical body on the government-ordained Switch Off Day, they were antsy and frustrated. It was said that many of them could no longer properly taste food. He heard rumours of something called ‘joyhacking’: people coming to their senses, hundreds of miles from their home, disorientated, after strangers had recoded the electronic systems connected to their brains and ridden them around for a period of days, just for fun. But Bob didn’t know if that was actually true, just as he didn’t know if a lot was true these days.
He waited patiently, standing seven or eight yards clear of Cavendish and staring at a tractor and an old motorised go-kart, both seasoned with moss and half-sunk into the earth on the far corner of the farmyard. It was a long time since any agricultural work had happened here.
‘Mr Turner,’ said Cavendish, finally. ‘What can I do for you on this perfect spring day?’
‘David,’ said Bob. ‘How is life treating you? How is your dad?’
‘Well, I have to be honest and say it is not looking good. I do not think there is very long left. It is a very sad thing to see for all of us.’
‘I’m so sorry to hear that, David.’
‘I imagine you are here to talk about what we talked about a little while back.’
‘Well…’
‘Did you know – and you will appreciate this, I’m sure, as a man who likes books – that the way the Crow Indian killed buffalo in the seventeenth century was rarely with arrows or tomahawks? What they did instead was drive them off cliffs, sometimes as many as 700 of them, far more than they could eat. They used songs. Can you believe that? Songs! At the time, the buffalo was the most common wild animal on the entire planet. Can you imagine it? Biting into some freshly cooked buffalo by a campfire? The taste sensation. Oh no, you are a lettuce muncher, aren’t you. But still. Delicious, don’t you think.’
‘No, I did not know any of that, David.’
‘I am a mine of facts these days. A mine, I tell you. It is driving Polly crazy. I won’t shut up. It’s ever since I opened up this new window on here,’ Cavendish tapped his visor, ‘that permits you to absorb an audiobook at six times the speed of the actual narration. It allows you to do so many other things at the same time. But don’t think I don’t envy you. I wish I had your life too, for sure. Living in the right here and now. Listening to the owls, without distraction. Firewriting on your coppiced hazel. See, the thing is, Bob, I spoke to Dad about the field a couple of times, and he couldn’t remember anything about what you said. And now, well, you can’t really talk to him at all. It’s just isolated words and dribble. Sometimes he’ll just say the word “anvil” or “lips” and a nurse will come in to mop up, and that will be it, for three days. Terribly sad for all of us. You know what he was like, Bob. He’s a generous man. To his own detriment, it could be said, at times. He could sometimes offer people things he shouldn’t. Maybe it was a flaw, but it’s one of the things we all miss about him. Because what he is now, in that bed in that home… it seems terrible to say it, but it’s not him. It’s very heartbreaking for all of us to see.’
‘I am sorry about that, David. It must be very difficult for you. But I do have a record of the payment on my bank statement: £68,000 transferred from my account to his.’
‘If that’s true, that’s true. But who is to say what the money was for? Is there a record of that? Perhaps it was for something else you owed him. Maybe it was a gambling debt? Ha! We are all getting older and facts get misremembered. Isn’t that the way with all of history? We think Indians killed buffalo with tomahawks but really they often didn’t. They killed them with cliffs and songs. No, but seriously, we could talk about this, and that is fine, but I think the best way would be for you to contact the people you need to contact, and for them to contact some people in another office who act on my behalf, and that way we can move forward, or not.’
‘I’ve noticed some posts in the field, and some string. Someone’s painted numbers on the ground.’
‘As I said, I think we could talk about this, and that is fine, but I think the best way would be for you to contact the people you need to contact, and for them to contact some people in another office who act on my behalf. I hope you have a nice afternoon in your house, Bob. That balcony must be a very nice place to sit and watch the world go by.’
On the way back down the track, as an act of defiance, Bob cut left through a gap in an attractive row of mossy-rooted beech, and across the Cavendish land, towards the river. As he did, he saw Cavendish’s eight-year-old son, the freshest and most up to date of all the David Cavendishes, on a chair in the middle of one of the back fields, also talking animatedly into his visor, in much the same way his dad had, and with a smaller version of the same body. It gave Bob a vision of an entire alternate version of human history, measured entirely in David Cavendishes, all getting gradually more feckless and avoidant and lardy and technology-obsessed, until finally you reached the last David Cavendish of all, who was just a small shiny circuit box sellotaped to the top of a large blob of congealed out-of-date butter.
You could hook down from here, as a trespasser, to one of the most attractive and clandestine stretches of the river: a place of plaited lichen and abrupt rocky declivities and deep plunge pools where he and Sally had often swum in spring and summer. One of the advantages of Cavendish’s fecklessness was that the fields down on this furthest section of the farm had reverted to meadows and now bled seamlessly into the wilder, beardier terrain beyond that was owned by only the water. Directly there, along this eastern bank of the river, was the route Sally had taken home on a day he’d never forget when he lost her up on the high moor. Half a mile further up the valley was an abandoned cottage, reachable down a steep track on the most resilient off-road vehicle but never boasting its own electricity and unoccupied for over fifty years, although it was said that a rich London banker now owned it and the land around it. It was marked on Bob’s Ordnance Survey map as ‘Megan’s House’. The top branches of an alder tree now poked out of its roof. Every time he walked past it, he remembered Sally talking about the terrible things that had happened to pianos during the middle of the last century, when they were elbowed out of the hallowed place they had traditionally occupied in middle-class homes by televisions; the way people had burned them and nihilistically taken axes to them. All that craftsmanship gone, just like that. It made her want to weep, she said. He forgot now how they’d got onto the subject; maybe it was just because they’d been speculating about when Megan’s House was last occupied and had decided it was probably around the time the first TVs started turning up in people’s homes. Or maybe it wasn’t that at all and was just the usual scattershot flow of conversation when they walked. Often, they’d follow the river all the way up to the bare, blasted moor at the top, and beyond. She was rarely without an observation and for every quirk of nature, every bit of wild growth he noticed, she noticed two more. Her mood seemed to rise with the moor itself. He’d always have a fold-away handsaw in his rucksack, in case he came across an old gate that had been thrown into a hedge. That’s what the farmers and the National Park authorities did when they replaced them: left them to rot. He’d find about one a month on average, on their walks, during that period. If he was lucky, he’d find a latch still attached to it and, if he was super lucky, it would be one over a century old, darkened and bruised by the decades.
He decided not to turn right up the valley today, and instead fought his way over and under fallen trees above the river, until he joined the wall on the far boundary of the field, his field. The wall arced around and became part of the old bridge, then continued to arc until it met the house. It was, in effect, a continuation of the house, although it had been here centuries longer. Perhaps the stone of the house looked incongruously smart and new next to the wall at first but now weather and time had done their work on it, the two co-existed happily, like a granddad and great-granddad whose generational divide had been bridged by their longevity. He noticed some clumps of hair trapped in the crevices of the wall, just beyond the bridge; badger, he assumed, or perhaps an intrepid moorland pony who’d wandered down from higher ground. There were a thousand kingdoms in the stone and, in each kingdom, a hundred cities, full of microscopic gardens. Who was to say what was in there was not the world? Who was to say where the world began and ended at all? Why stop at the planet’s biosphere? But, also, why go further than the end of the road? Who was to decide where anyone’s going concern began and ended? He remembered that period when it was all getting bigger and bigger, directly before the visor implants were approved by the government, when everything had seemed too enormous, too connected. You could talk to precisely as many people as you wanted to about any subject you wanted and because of that there was never nobody not discussing or arguing about anything and there was never not anything to check and everything you did check just gave you more to check. The acceleration had been overwhelming, as if, just when you thought it was already going too fast, technology had hit black ice. It spun, unstoppably. It nibbled away at minds. The future had arrived and it was not about outer space and fun, as he had been promised in his childhood, and Sally had been promised to a slightly lesser extent in hers; it was about gossip and meanness and the abolition of reasoned discourse. Addiction drove it and corporate greed drove the addiction. Neither Bob nor Sally had even been big users of social media but the space that opened out in their days when they disconnected, after the big changeover, left them gobsmacked. After the impulse to check gradually dissipated, because there was nothing to check any more, something else happened that they had not been expecting: they did not just regain their minds, they regained their bodies. They became more aware of their stomachs and hands and feet and sexual organs. They read a hundred pages of a book without moving from the place they sat. Their meals tasted better. Snow felt like snow again when it fell on their faces, like snow had felt when they were twelve. The universe became something you could roll around in the palm of your hand and feel the texture of again.
Sometimes they would go to towns and the city, or even to Underhill, and when they did they often saw people standing outside shops, standing in the road, standing in tram queues, screaming and ranting into their visors. Once such a thing would have been deemed deeply antisocial but everyone was used to it now. Sally and Bob kept their distance, because that was expected of them, as visorless people, and because they desired to. Each time they would think of these strangers ‘You are arguing with a person you will never meet about something that will never be resolved and this is your one time on earth’ and they would be glad, as hard as it had been, for the decision they’d made. And it had been hard: it made facts – facts about tomorrow’s weather, or a song they liked, or the date a monarch died – suddenly, frighteningly elusive, until they remembered there was a whole other way to come across facts and it did not make life worse. A dazzling daily sense of hope and possibility seemed to have been blown out like a candle, until they realised what it had always been was a facsimile of hope and possibility, a fast-food version of want that you kept wanting even though you always felt ill afterwards. She’d not lived as long as she should have but he could reassure himself that at least she had not spent the last decade of her life in some suspended attention-deficit simulacrum of existing.
They were both Taureans: him early, her late, just a day from being a Gemini. He never forgot her birthday, even now, but he had forgotten his own again, for the second time in three years. It had been last Friday. He had realised he’d forgotten because the following day while loading the stove he’d found a parcel left under the log store. It was from Sam. Inside was a dark brown latch, with a beautiful weathered curve to its ring. Bob dated it as late 1930s, maybe earlier. ‘To Bob,’ said the card inside. ‘Many gates still left to open! (Found up by the Trembling Hill Mine in January.) Love from Sam and Cami.’ In the post, which always arrived in late afternoon nowadays, another package arrived. The postmark on it was Hungarian, which made Bob think it was probably from Martin.
The rain seemed to be holding off so he’d decided to walk down the far end of the combe to thank Sam for the present and to take him a ninety-year-old book he’d found for him featuring a collection of intricate illustrations of moths. Cami, off work from the hospital today, had opened the door and as ever an ache – a complicated ache, with a hole in its centre – had creaked open in him when he saw her smile. She had wished Bob happy birthday for yesterday and said Sam was out, surveying a type of newt that had unexpectedly returned to a lagoon down near Torcross, but that he was welcome to come in for a cup of tea anyway. He’d thanked her but declined and said he’d stop by again at the weekend. Neither Sam nor Cami had ever been anything less than warm and accommodating to him, almost treating him like a second father at times, but he was also aware how magnetising he found their combined energy and how his loneliness made him more drawn to it. And because of that, when he was around them, or thinking of being around them, it was as if there was a little warden in his head, constantly checking he didn’t overstep the mark. His admiration for the way they lived – surviving resolutely visorless in two poorly paid jobs, knowing they would never buy their own house, reading, knitting, planting, making, learning – was so deep, it was important not to be seduced into believing he was part of it.
The rain had begun again on his walk back and, because he had known the patch of sky above him for a quarter of a century now, and the patterns of all its varying moods, instinct told him they were in for a few more of those heavy days when all the moisture came down and hit them at speed, when the river filled up and made its presence so rowdily, overwhelmingly felt that everything else was put to one side and life became a matter of waiting it out until the water decided to calm again. At the second of the humpback bridges, three men in visors and fluorescent jackets had been watching a white van, driven by science, attempt to manoeuvre itself through the narrow gap between the stones. Each had looked like he wanted to offer the van some advice. The taller of the three men – fox-faced, sixtyish – had seemed familiar to Bob but he couldn’t quite place him. That was nothing new these days, and the main worry that went with it – that the person would be someone who knew Bob well and would be offended by him not remembering them – was moot, since each of the men had ignored Bob, noticing him less than they would have if he was a minor gust of wind. He’d walked on, past an Edwardian post box in a cottage wall, repurposed as a plant pot. And, as he had, he’d remembered Sally talking about the story she had begun to write one day about an obsolete nineteenth-century post box where somebody posts a letter then gets a letter back from a person in that century, who becomes their penpal. She had got a third of the way through writing the story then abandoned it. She said she always had the ideas and the beginnings but lost interest in finding out how things ended. Her notebooks were a mirror of this, always two thirds blank, even the ones where she wrote down notes and reminders about her tuning jobs.
More and more, he found landscape and the landmarks within it sucking him back into past conversations, ghost feelings, old ambiences. It went beyond that, though. Even without the power of an evocative image as a trigger, he was able to spend whole hours – sometimes longer – swimming in a vanished event or afternoon. Perhaps this made him no more present and mindful than those who wore the visors but at least his mind was his own: nobody was dictating his memories to him and organising them into albums on a screen. Some of Jim’s hair he’d found trapped beneath the piano lid while cleaning it a couple of weeks ago – the hair still turned up in the oddest places, even all these months after the dog’s death – spun him off into an afternoon from two winters before, when he’d held Jim on his lap and gently cut knots of matted fur from his stomach, as Jim had lain there with a trusting look that broke his heart as it happened and rebroke it now as it rehappened. Maybe he misremembered much of what he lived through – timescales, sequences, the maths of it – but as he dipped into it via memory the feelings were refelt just as strongly, if not stronger.
He opened Martin’s package, which turned out to be an album he had put out via his new label over in Hungary. ‘I finally, fucking FINALLY, got this together!’ said the note. ‘Miss you, you hairy bastard. M. x’ The record was called Penny Marshwort: The Songs of RJ McKendree. Martin had been obsessed for years with the work of McKendree, an American singer songwriter who’d blown across the edge of the moor in the late sixties and written a set of haunting folk songs that were coated in the place and the time but also in something otherworldly, something a little like shattered glass, something you couldn’t quite piece together in your mind as you heard it. Martin, in a dogged fuck-the-naysayers Martin way, had been hugely instrumental in getting the late McKendree’s work to a wider audience, even half-written a book on him many years ago, and now, with the singer’s cult following growing, he’d managed to assemble an impressive group of neo-psychedelic songwriters and sensitive troubadours to pay tribute to his work. Amongst the covers of McKendree’s songs was even a version of the title track by the reclusive former pop sensation Taylor Swift, released under the pseudonym ‘Maddie Chagford’. Bob noticed that Martin’s musician partner Reka was featured on the record too and wondered if that might turn out to be a bit of jarring nepotism on the part of Martin, but her rendition of ‘Little Meg’ – a traditional local folk song already made unrecognisable in McKendree’s reworking of it, very different to the version Bob had heard Sally sing a couple of times – was utterly fantastic, and like nothing Bob had heard before: a half-chanted incantation that somehow managed to be simultaneously a brooding funk workout and sound like somebody inventing electricity in a moonlit recess in some rocks above a beach. Over the dirty dishes in the sink, as the record played, the identity of the fox-faced man on the bridge came to Bob. It had been Jac, his neighbour from the long house, all that time ago. But the fact meant little to Bob and he was mostly elsewhere in his mind. Something – he wasn’t sure precisely what – had taken him back to a night in the summer of 1999, maybe a year or so before Martin had introduced him to McKendree’s music. A club in Covent Garden, mostly full of tourists. Seventies-disco-themed. Martin, lit by booze and the city, trying to convince two Portuguese women that Bob had acted in porn. Bob, playing along, but wincing inside, feeling, at thirty, too old for it all, on the cusp of a form of cultural retirement. He’d lost his jumper – his favourite – at the end of the night. Forty-four years ago. The same gap separating his birth from the year Mussolini put Italy under a dictatorship. But from here, right now… an almost touchable time. Felt like the end of something, palpably. A deadened and toxic sensation in his oesophagus on the walk to the train station afterwards. A new resolve building out of that deadness. A Chinese restaurant. A wasted meal. Hard to eat when you’re that particular kind of drunk. Martin had an extra job, as well as the writing, talent scouting for a record label. That was it: they’d been to see a band he’d been tipped off about. ‘Rucksack full of wank,’ he’d said, turning to Bob after three songs. ‘The tedium compels me to go somewhere and dance.’ ‘Dance’ being Martin’s euphemism for fuck, but not always. Sometimes it meant fight, too. Always up for an argument with a stranger, Martin. A couple of times, chasing a woman, vanishing in the process, he’d left Bob stranded. Nowhere to stay. Five-hour gap until the morning train. Hash browns and a quarter kip on a cold metal bench. Bob forgave him. Always. Then one other night. A bit later. Martin on cocaine, wolf-eyed. Ripped Bob’s favourite shirt off after finding out he was moving far away, to Devon. Bob forgave him less for that. But still forgave him.
In the forty-eight minutes the record had lasted, the river had redoubled its cry. The pounding bass of the rain was no match for it. The ambience was all treble. It was being retuned by cloudfall. Bob took Martin’s note and put it in a drawer in his sideboard. Also in the drawer was the latch from Sam, a couple of other old notes and letters from friends, two eleven-year-old parking fines, Sally’s papps wedge, some pebbles and a sealed envelope with ‘IN THE EVENT OF MY DEATH’ written on it, containing a letter instructing the house and all the possessions within it to be given to Sam and Cami. He found a browning floret of broccoli behind the kettle and tossed it into the river, which devoured it. Wavelets lashed at the bridge then sprinted under the balcony. The water had been higher than this but rarely faster, and he could hear the granite grinding. Fleur had once said that it was a good job the boulders were under water because with the force that they rubbed against each other they could probably start a fire.
In late August the new dwellings began to go up: A-frames, oak. The chainsaws took down Edna’s tree in minutes, making a mockery of all the years of its slow bittersweet decline. He’d been ready, having seen the sign on the lane at the top of the hill a few weeks earlier. ‘BLACK DOG PARK: A Moorland Experience’ the sign announced. Three acres of gorse bushes, tussocks, ferns, brambles – a bona fide galaxy of habitats for tiny creatures – were smoothed to a neat, levelled-off brownness. Men in hard hats with visors beneath the hard hats made offerings to the river of sandwich wrappers, drink cartons and urine. Jac sometimes milled amongst them, clipboarded, vulpine, pointy of face and hand. Bob considered taking him some of the manure he’d requested by text, with an apology that it was twenty-four years late. Maybe a couple of thousand tonnes of it. One evening at dusk after the men had all gone home, an actual fox, as if deeply offended to be so poorly imitated and misunderstood, wandered over, backed up and sprayed one of the half-completed lodges, and left. Fewer blue tits and dunnocks landed on Bob’s feeders now. The pair of merganser ducks he’d been encouraging onto the balcony for most of the year had vanished. Bob looked at the solicitor’s number he had written down in spring and did not use his still-functioning landline to call the solicitor’s number he had written down in spring. He merely decided to further reduce what he had decided his world was. It now ended at the river’s midpoint. Nothing else was his concern. There was enough to take care of here on the other side, anyway. He was still finding a lot of hair in the house. He began to wonder if after all some of it was his, not the dog’s. He threw the hair in the river and the river made it vanish. The water level had been higher than usual for most of the summer and, because it was always higher in winter, he looked at the bridge and wondered if this winter would be the one when it finally happened.
On the occasions when they’d climbed the valley to the high moor, on the opposite bank, on the unofficial path, they’d learned a lot about all the secret places where the water gathered its voices and power. It was a long, vertiginous, weaving stretch of ground: almost three miles to the very top. All the way, the moss got thicker, the dripping sounds heavier. Often, by the time you reached the top and emerged from the woodland, you were on a murky cloud planet. Black shapes hovered in front of you, not making their identity known until the last moment. Ponies, sheep, gorse, rheumatic witchering half-trees that had been brought to the edge of death by weather, again and again, without being quite taken over the line. Vegetation up here got flayed by the bronchial output of the sky and only the strongest and wiriest of it survived. In the woodland, before they reached the top, the pair of them stroked the moss. It felt and smelt cleaner than any carpet. Sally said the tree trunks looked like they were wearing welly socks. He suggested that maybe this was why her hair grew so fast and big: it benefited from all this rain, like the moss. He was joking but maybe there was some truth in it. His own hadn’t bounced back big and fierce like hers but its escape from his scalp had lost momentum since he moved here. They came back to the house with their clothes stuck to their bodies, their skin dripping, with many of the folds and creases they’d seen in the mirror first thing in the morning ironed out. But on the day he lost her up there it wasn’t that kind of day. It was a frostier, stiller day – rare here – when the river was low and the moisture in the air was motionless. They decided to walk all the way up past the reservoir to Trembling Hill, to the abandoned silver and lead mine. By the time they got there the mist had fallen down, sweeping across the mine’s deep black eye holes like a huge net curtain made heavy by years of cigarette smoke. They decided it was not wise to venture further and retraced their steps, past a pre-Bronze Age kistvaen that had been uncovered during the early part of the last century. Ancient trinkets and fancy evening wear buried deep in the peat. Visibility was reduced to almost nothing which meant he couldn’t see the bit of the hill which always reminded him of a vast mouth that had had its teeth knocked out with a hammer, but he estimated that’s where they were. The land began to tilt and the river, very faintly audible in the distance, was in the opposite direction to the one it should have been. His uncertainty made him press on more briskly, in an attempt to make the world make sense again, and it was his haste that caused him to lose her, although he didn’t realise it for – what? – seven minutes, eight. He called out behind him into the mist, or was it really mist at all, no, and not fog either, but that other thing, quick and speckled and particular to the moor, that could not quite be categorised as either. Fist? Mog? Mog. The dreaded mog. The mog ate sound, swallowed it without needing to chew. Hearing no reply to his calls, the central worry of the last half an hour of his existence – that he had been upended into a visionless ghost universe with no way out by mythical beings – was entirely usurped by his guilt of what he had done in bringing her here. She’d not felt well that morning; the rash she often got across her face from the lupus had been worse than it had been for a while. He’d pushed her too hard. They should have gone the other way, over the back and up the lane and up the old sunken track – people said it was more sunken because of the medieval packhorses that pressed the earth down deeper and deeper – to look at a latch over there that Sam had told him about that had been made from two old horseshoes. It was the first time since the visors came in that he’d really ached for his old smartphone. Even though there’d never been a whiff of reception up here, he’d still ached for it.
She was only gone for two hours but it was the longest two hours he had lived since he was a child. Two hours of terror and weighing outcomes and decisions and possibilities. Two hours containing a novel’s worth of small anxieties. He called and called for her then he listened hard for the river and found it and, even though it was not in the place it should have been, he followed it, tumbling and bumping back down the wild mossy valley as if pulled on a rope. Halfway down, he tripped on a tree root and landed on a gnarly outlying branch whose deep bloodwork on his left calf he would not notice until hours later. He could see only one thing and that was the telephone on the small table in the living room, and even though he couldn’t factually see it, could see it only in his mind, he stared at nothing else until he had it in his hand. It was after he’d reached it, and called the moorland rescue team, and the police, and turned himself inside out wondering what else he could do, wondering if he should have stayed up top looking for her after all, that, in desperation, not in hope but in the pure inability to stay still, he began to march back up the valley and saw her walking towards him. Her hair glistened with crusts of frost and she looked dejected and sapped but she greeted him calmly. She told him she’d done just the same thing he had: listened to the river, then followed it. But why had it taken so much longer for her to get back? And was she OK? She said she was fine, it was fine, it had all been very simple. She was here, and she was going to come into the house and lie down, and everything was going to be fine.
You didn’t live on the moor and not know the stories about hikers being piskie-led on the high ground, disorientated in the sparkly mists, spun around, locked in place, tricked into thinking a place was another place. Tiny high-pitched laughter had been heard to ring out from deep in the cloud. Its melodies moved in circles, through the moisture. The little people – pixies, they were more modernly called, but he preferred piskies, the pre-twentieth-century version – came out from their hiding places and led you astray and the only way to reverse the spell was to turn out your pockets; he knew the drill so well but he’d forgotten and hadn’t done it. It was just weather, nothing more, and the only reason it felt like dark magic was that weather itself was a form of dark magic, but he would never quite forget the stoned, tilted feeling he had up there that day, as if the landscape had spiked his drink. He knew it was just coincidence, that her health had been getting worse anyway for a long time, but it was after that day that the different period began for them. She had told him she loved him for the last time. She was withdrawn, more still, but not in a peaceful way. Her one remaining exuberance seemed to come out solely in the way she cleaned her body behind closed doors. It was as if the larger part of who she was had been cancelled. She worked less, which she’d said she’d wanted to do for a long time, but in the spaces that this opened up she didn’t do any of the things she’d told him she would. One day he found her on the balcony with his craft knife, hacking into her hair, letting loose strands of it blow into the water below her. Next to her on the planks he saw singed grey tresses, candle wax. It was the first in a series of clandestine burnings, more often than not featuring small household objects, which culminated, a few months later, in him clearing out the fireplace one morning and finding the iron remnants of one of his sculptures in the cooling ashes.
‘I am sorry, Bob,’ she had said. She stared directly ahead into the ash and there was no meanness in her voice. ‘But I didn’t like that one.’
And then she got really ill, and was admitted to hospital. And he felt terrible that she was gone, and then he felt additionally terrible on top of that that he felt some relief about being able to be in the house without wondering where she was and where her mind was drifting to and what the next thing would be that she would set fire to. After the end, people talked to him like she’d been snatched from him but, although he never verbalised it, what he felt was that she’d been snatched from him a long time before that. Which was another thing that made that final instruction – that last burst of clarity and passion, when he almost saw who she used to be for a moment – so startling.
There had been a lull between the wooden posts first going in and the lodges beginning to go up, but now the construction work had begun, it was happening quickly. Within a fortnight, eight A-frames were up. Within a month, twenty. The foam on the edges of the river became different, tinged with pinks and blues. He did not see David Cavendish on the building site and did not expect to. Cavendish had not been interested in the field as a physical entity before and would probably be no more interested now, with the exception of the financial side of affairs relating to it. Bob wondered about his motivation, what could possibly come of this investment that would make the ultraworld the rich quasi-agriculturist lived inside more pleasurable and decadent. The pursuit of money for such people, past a certain point, seemed to be most of all a strident denial of mortality, and the more they were able to abrogate the nitty gritty of life via technology, the more emphatic that denial became. They used their wealth to protect themselves with bigger cars, to build more secure fences and walls to protect their three-dimensional living spaces, to build a digital wall around themselves to protect them from other parts of life. Finally, they seemed to want to use it to protect themselves against the banality of death, as if the cushion of power they had gained would secure a deluxe executive afterlife for them. But despite all science had achieved, and for all the money many had put into researching the idea, nobody had yet discovered how to live forever. In the end, the dust that would be David Cavendish would be no more exclusive or elite than the dust that had been Sally, the dust he had scattered on the hillside facing him two years ago. Dust that had immediately been washed into the river by the combe’s heavy rains and, if some of it had remained on the grass and was now beneath the lodges, had surely now sunk deep into the earth.
The changes in building regulations and planning permission introduced by the government in the second and third decades of the century had been devastating for natural habitats on the edge of the moor. Underhill – and, to an extent, its surrounding hamlets – had expanded rapidly, but a lull followed: nobody had built anything new around here for several years. This perhaps made people in the valley a little complacent, slower to realise what was happening with the lodges and the impact they might have. Martina Whittaker had been over to tell him there was a residents’ committee meeting scheduled to protest the development, to see if anything at all could be done at this late stage. He knew, because Sam had been over to invite him to the same meeting a day earlier. Bob said he would be there but when the night of the meeting arrived he found himself instead not at the meeting but on the balcony, a glass of whiskey in hand, watching the river. It was so full all the time now but tonight it was not angry. Its sound was more like the hushed chatter you get in an auditorium where people are waiting for an important announcement. Because the water level was now higher, more moss had begun to grow up the walls of the house, grey-green wiry wavy stuff. Autumn was happening and autumn never stayed long so you could more or less say it was winter and on winter’s darkest days the combe let in so little light, it was like living down deep in the gap between two sofa cushions. Days soon became all beginning and end, a couple of bookends you convinced yourself was life. The sun found it difficult to get down in the gap between the cushions and kill the frost there. To maximise the last of the daylight before it all happened, he opened windows and doors all over the house. The through-draught stirred up more hair. There was ever such a lot. It showed him that maybe he hadn’t really cleaned properly when he thought he had. Such a hairy place, the deep south west of the country. He thought of a film director, the only one he ever interviewed in his time writing for the magazine. Lived on a corner plot of land, a jutting elbow of salt soil, like a smaller replica of the far east elbow of the country where it was situated. Bald man. Immaculate house. No hair in it anywhere. But here, by contrast, you got hair on your walls, hair in your piano. One night in November there was a storm and Bob closed the windows. A long, sharp piece of concrete render fell from the roof, smashing outside the front door. If he’d been standing there, that would have been it for him, but he wasn’t. The A-frames withstood the storm. Martina Navratilova – the lady who’d invited him to the meeting; he thought that was her surname but couldn’t remember for sure – saw him when he was down the lane, looking for kindling. Her granddad had once punched a bull who charged at him. That’s what Sally, who’d heard the story from Fleur, had once told him. Martina Navratilova said they’d all been disappointed not to see him at the meeting last week. Whittaker! That was it. Not Navratilova. That was someone else. He opened the gate leading to the field. He didn’t like the latch on it: it was one of the ones with a coil, not yet bestowed with character by time. The wood made a nice sound but not the metal. He could see the highest of the lodges poking out over the hillside. It wasn’t the most ugly set of buildings. You could convince yourself it was all quite rustic and pleasant if you blocked out all the beetles and dormice it had slaughtered. It was quiet now, no drills or hammers or diggers for several days. Some men in hard hats still wandered about with clipboards, not doing much. As, back at home, he pissed into the toilet with the blind up on the window facing the river, he saw one of the men looking straight at him from across the water. It might have been Jac but it was hard to tell due to the condensation on the glass. The man continued to stare and Bob continued to piss and then the man turned away and right then Bob knew Bob had won.
She used to say she wanted to run away.
‘But you are away,’ he’d say. ‘Look where we live. We couldn’t be much more away. Maybe if we lived in northern Canada or Finland or something, but not here.’
‘Yes, I know, so why does it feel like that?’
There’d been a man, a customer, some bloody weirdo, who wouldn’t leave her alone, kept wanting his piano tuned over and over again when the thing was totally fine, could not have sounded better, then when she told him she couldn’t work for him any more, he contacted her via a fake identity on social media, tried to book her services again. It wasn’t quite frightening enough to go to the police about but it had scared her. But it wasn’t even that. It was a prevalent feeling at that particular time: a feeling that it was all in your face, everyone, everything, all the time, on your screens. They both had dreams about total strangers filing into their house, telling them what was wrong with the way they lived. It wasn’t his fault and it wasn’t hers; it wasn’t most people’s fault. People’s brains – everyone’s – were still pre-industrial village brains, brains built for the nineteenth century, and the eighteenth century, and a lot of the centuries prior to that, and could not be expected to cope with this overflowing rush of world, this full spate river of statement and opinion. But then after that they had felt like they had finally run away, for eight years, and maybe even for the two different years that came after. She, he knew, had felt more like she was in a place. And that made him more confident that sprinkling her remains over the thing – he forgot what it was called now, but it was green, and directly across the river from the house – was the right course of action. It had been a good time, that period. But he could not say if it was her best time. He could not even say if it was his best time, even though he told himself it was. A lot of it was guesswork, how you remembered your own life. He could not feel his body and mind as it had been on a day on a Tuesday afternoon in 1998 or a Thursday morning in 1982 or a Saturday evening in 2006. But sometimes when he went away from the present and swam about in snapshots of memory, he got close to it. Music helped. She told him about that once: how melodies worked, stimulating neuro-pathways that other things couldn’t. In the orchestra she was in, they played old songs for people who had the illness. The big disease with the little name. No, that was a line from a song about something different. The little disease with the big name. No, not a little disease. A horrible thing, anyway, and music somehow penetrated it, took them back to something, revived something.
He wanted to play the piano. It shouldn’t just sit there, gathering hair. The desire had come over him out of nowhere. Would it be too late to learn? Why had he never asked her to teach him? Was that neglectful of him? Could he have taken more of an interest? At least found out how it all worked? He opened the lid and wiped the hair off a couple of the keys and pulled some more out of the gap between them and hit the keys experimentally. He noticed starlings, more of a plume than a murmuration, out the window and as he did he felt this had all happened before: the opening of the piano, the slight cough caught in his throat, the birds, the bottle of Baby Bio on the window ledge. It was a kind of déjà vu he experienced now, but different to what déjà vu used to be. It always felt like he was experiencing the reality of a dream he’d dreamed and that he also knew what happened next but couldn’t touch it. It was as vivid as when he got sucked into the past but it was different: it sucked him into the present, as imagined from the past. The moment always felt weighted equally with significance and banality until he lost it, like a small precious object dropped in a toilet bowl just as you’d pulled the chain.
The last person who’d played the piano had not been Sally but Fleur, not long before she died. In her seventies, she’d taken a younger lover – a town councillor of just forty-eight – and it had been the talk of the combe. Bob, now at a similar age, would do nothing of the sort. Firstly, how would that even happen? And secondly, it had not occurred to him as an ambition. He had met Fleur’s younger man just once, a reedy human with a nervous chuckle who, even though he was of a roughly equal width and height to Fleur, gave the slight impression of living inside her coat. The encounter had been on the lane, around this time of year, and Fleur had talked about how late the bats were staying around now, and how much it worried her. Now they stayed around even later. December, sometimes. ‘GO HOME, bats,’ Fleur had said, to the bats.
Bob had never put a blind or curtain over the large skylight Fleur had installed in the bedroom, since it would have been too tricky, and waking up with the dawn light had never been much of a problem for him. But it could be confusing, on nights when the sky was clear and the moon was at its fullest. It could make you as confused as a bat who should be hibernating. Waking up to the bright white light, he had been known to head to the kitchen and put the kettle on, only to then look at the clock on the dining-room wall and realise it was somewhere around 2 a.m. So when he woke again tonight, with the moon full and the bedroom flooded with light, it was not initially perturbing to him. Two subsequent factors made him realise there was something extra at play: the glow was much more orange than usual, and the room was warm. Before he stepped out onto the balcony, before he’d even seen the deeper orange light, its spinning shapes, through the pane of the kitchen door, he knew what was happening, and with that came the knowledge that he’d always known it would happen, forever.
The fire was well under way, past the point of reversal or rescue. Five of the lower lodges had been brought to the ground and the flames were licking their way up the valley, deep into the bowels of the dwellings on the terraces above. The pure rage of it reminded him of the river when it was at its most unstoppable. It was not something that could be reasoned with. But standing on the balcony he did not worry for a second about it reaching him, or even about the smoke troubling his lungs. The river was at a brimming, tumultuous height – a height that defied the logic of the last few days’ rain – and provided a protective barrier, a barrier even more inarguable than the conflagration. It splashed up high and wild against the walls of the house, splashed against him too. He realised, belatedly, that he was naked, but he was not afraid. He decided he could happily, very happily, let it take him: the river, the trees beyond, the valley, the moor, everything. He would be more than OK with that. He realised he was singing but he had no idea what the song was, only that he knew it. He grabbed his whiskey bottle from the kitchen sink and drank from it. The air smelled good and rich, like something being turned over and exposed, and he thought for a moment he could hear a siren in the distance, but then thought maybe he had imagined it, and he wasn’t able to tell because his singing was so loud, and the river was loud too, and he had no wish for either to stop. On the right-hand side of the valley, where one of the higher A-frames – one of the taller, more high-specification lodges, which was to be rented at a greater price to the ones nearer the river – had fallen, the fire had also opened up a gap in the trees, but had not reached beyond that to the bigger trees where the valley began to get mossier, which would reject the advances of the fire with their immense moisture. The gap and all the light from the moon and the fire allowed him to see one particularly memorable, wide-armed oak and he thought about the time he had walked past it with Sally, which had been the same afternoon they’d walked past the abandoned house and she’d talked about people destroying the pianos in the fifties and sixties: thousands of them, kicked and smashed to fuck or set alight. It had actually been on this same walk that she’d told him about Martina Whittaker – yes, he had her surname now, and would not let it slip away – and her grandfather, who had punched the bull in the face when it charged him. There had been an old faded ‘BULL IN FIELD’ sign still up there at that point, which must have triggered the story. He recalled now also that he’d somehow got the details twisted: it was Martina’s great-grandfather who had punched the bull in the face, not her grandfather. Standing there naked, illuminated by the flames, staring at the tree, he remembered everything Sally had told him; he did not forget a thing.