James mentions the backlog of papers in the letterbox cage at number 36 as he zips up his coat, preparing to leave for his round. Chris is listening, though he’s a sentence or two in arrears, his thoughts mostly occupied by the rising water. It’s Emma, entering the room in her pyjamas, list clasped in her hand, who responds.
‘Sorry, what did you say?’
‘I was telling Dad about this house near Hesketh Park. They haven’t bothered to pick up their papers for days. And they haven’t left me a tip.’
‘Have you told anyone?’ Emma asks.
James coughs. Now he has Chris’s full attention.
‘I could mention it to Terry.’
‘So you’ve been strolling up and stuffing papers into a logjam?’ Emma replies.
‘Yeah.’
‘What were you thinking?’
Chris catches a flicker of something in James’s eyebrows, a balk at Emma’s disappointment, and almost feels sorry for him. Then it’s gone and James is pushing his glasses up his nose and being facetious.
‘I expect I was thinking about gum disease and Alzheimer’s and whether we should all start using mouthwash. Or I might have been thinking of—’
‘Why would anyone ignore their papers like that?’ Emma persists. ‘You’ll take James, won’t you, Chris? See what’s going on.’
‘You want me to drive into town and sit outside people’s houses with the engine idling?’
‘It’s a one-off.’
‘I’m about to fill some sandbags. We haven’t got much sand, but there’s compost in the shed.’
‘There’s not much compost, either. The water’s been higher than this. Remember the storm in 2015? There’s supposed to be a break in the rain soon.’
‘Call the police if you’re worried, Em. They’ll drive round and have a look.’
‘I’m sure they’ve got better things to do. They’d probably have to come from Crosby or Formby – when did you last see any police officers just hanging around town? James is full of cold, and it’s pouring. Why don’t you drive him? Isn’t it too late for sandbags – can you put them down in water?’
‘It’s not ideal. But better late than never. We can use them indoors, as a last resort, if we have to.’
Emma glances at her list. She opens a cupboard and, lips pursed, removes bags of marshmallows, chocolate drops, orange Smarties and a box of Matchmakers.
‘I thought we could make little snowmen, later, like the one from Frozen, and—’ She stops mid-sentence. ‘Are you all right, Janet?’
Chris turns to see his mother shuffling down the hall in her dressing gown. Half her hair is pressed flat to her head, the other half stands to attention and she is holding the hobby horse.
‘You don’t look well this morning,’ Emma says. ‘Sit down and I’ll make you a coffee.’
‘Oh, it’s just a headache. Don’t worry about me.’
Chris watches as Emma places a mug of coffee in front of his mother, who leans the horse against the table, as if it is joining them for breakfast.
‘I’m sure your dad doesn’t want you getting wet, James,’ his mother says – she must have been listening on the stairs. ‘You’ll drive him, won’t you, Chris?’
‘You know, I think being decent in the present is the best preparation for the future,’ Emma says, glancing over her shoulder as she empties a bag of miniature marshmallows into a Mason jar. ‘If we co-operate now, we’ll have people to depend on in the future. It’s about building networks. Like trees and their Wood Wide Web.’
‘Guess what percentage of land plants are in mutually beneficial relationships with fungi, Emma-Jane. Ninety per cent.’
‘Well, there you are.’ Emma opens a second bag of marshmallows. ‘Even plants know it’s better to work together.’
‘This may shock you both, but I know a bit about plants, too. They compete for resources, and some of them release chemicals that harm their neighbours. I don’t mind keeping James dry, but I’m not keen on poking my nose in—’
‘Oh, but it’s Christmas,’ his mother says.
Chris feels himself yielding. Emma manages to be a good daughter by remembering birthdays, calling her parents weekly and taking the boys to Cornwall for ten days each summer holiday, usually while Chris is conveniently busy at work. For him, it has always been trickier. His mother doesn’t want presents or phone calls; she wants conversion, something he is unable to offer. And so, when she asks for something that is easily accomplished, it is hard to refuse.
‘Fine. Christmas taxi, neighbourhood watch, police patrol: coming up. I’ll grab my coat and we’ll get going.’
Chris waits outside the newsagent, wipers cutting peepholes through the rain. Each time the water clears, he is met by the words on the empty window of the shop next door: ‘EVERYTHING MUST GO’.
When James returns, Chris heads for the park, eventually pulling up outside number 36. The wind is up, the temperature has dropped, and it finally feels more like winter. James leads them down the path in the thumping rain. This time, instead of ramming another paper through the letterbox, James stands under the door canopy and rings the bell while Chris, hood up, cups his hands around his eyes and presses his face to the front-room window. There’s a streetlight behind them and it’s too dark to see anything but its reflection.
‘Did you hear it ring?’
‘No.’
‘Try again and listen carefully. It could be one of those quiet ones. Or maybe the batteries have died.’
‘Still can’t hear anything.’
Compared to its neighbours, the house looks tired. The wood-framed windows need sanding and painting, and the render is cracked and stained. Chris looks over his shoulder at the front garden. The borders are overgrown and a deep puddle in the corner opposite the gate indicates a problem with drainage. The house next door is covered in scaffolding. Looks like they’ve been working on the roof. Terrible weather for it.
Chris joins James on the doorstep. The end of a newspaper pokes out of the letterbox. He tugs on it. The tip is damp; at some point, the rain must have found the precise diagonal to undermine the canopy. Once he has retrieved the paper, he kneels and props the letterbox flap open with index finger and thumb. With his other hand buried up to the wrist and, fighting the draught-excluding brush, Chris pulls out another paper, and another, continuing until the opening is clear.
‘Know what you looked like with your arm stuck in the letterbox? A vet! Like you were delivering the papers!’ James’s laugh catches and erupts into a motoring cough.
When the rattle has died, Chris takes his phone out of his pocket and selects the torch setting. Crouching, he props the flap open and attempts to hold back some of the bristles while checking the hall floor for a body.
‘I can’t see anything,’ he says.
A noise from above startles them and Chris edges back on to the driveway. An elderly man leans out of an upstairs window.
‘What on earth are you doing?’ he hisses.
‘Nothing! I’m not – My son, here, delivers your papers.’
James steps out from under the canopy and into the rain.
‘He was worried about you,’ Chris lies. ‘We wanted to make sure you hadn’t fallen.’
‘Well, I haven’t!’
‘Are you unwell? Are you stuck up there? Can I call someone?’
‘No, no, and no. Have you moved the papers?’
‘They’re on the doorstep. If you come down, I’ll pass them to—’
‘Put them back.’
‘The cage was full; they were sticking out of the letterbox.’
‘For goodness’ sake, you’re as bad as the neighbours.’
The rain spatters fatly on their coats. Chris shades his eyes from the drops as he studies the man, no idea what to say or do next.
‘Do you want today’s paper?’ James asks.
‘I’ve paid for it, haven’t I?’
‘So, you want me and my son to—’
‘—-put them back.’
‘Jam them all …?’
‘Yes! Put them back. I’ve got family coming later.’
‘They’ll be worried if they see everything hanging out of the letterbox …’
‘Yes,’ he agrees and closes the window.
Chris and James ram the papers back into the letterbox.
‘Maybe his family don’t visit very often,’ James says as they head back to the van.
‘I can’t imagine why they wouldn’t.’
As they climb in, James coughs again.
‘Any phlegm?’ Chris asks.
‘Why, do you want some?’
‘Is the cough in your chest, or your throat?’
‘It’s just a cold, Dad.’
‘Your mum’s going to be disappointed,’ Chris says as he follows James’s directions to the next house. ‘She was hoping we’d save the day. Prove we’re as connected as trees.’
‘Poor Emma-Jane.’
‘You mean Mum.’ Chris indicates and pulls over. ‘There’s a plant that pretends to be ill. It mimics moth damage to trick larvae – they think the leaves’ nutrients are already eaten and go elsewhere. We could say our friend at number thirty-six was like that. Faking it. Except, unlike the plant, he wanted attention.’
‘Tell Mum about the faking plant and she’ll say, “Oh, that’s really interesting.” She’ll mean it, too.’ James unfastens his belt, opens the door and jumps into a puddle. ‘You’ll have to try harder to annoy her,’ he says as the door slams behind him.
Oh, to be fourteen years old again and think he’d got the measure of his parents. To see their relationship in simple, two-dimensional terms: a goodie and a baddie, a leader and a follower. Even as an adult, he’d had a fixed and, it turns out, inadequate understanding of his parents. His father, wandering a forty-year spiritual wilderness of his own making, and his mother, the sidekick on a journey that was not her own.
‘This is, like, an actual flood,’ James says as he climbs back in, shivering. ‘Someone should be out here, unblocking the drains.’
Chris snorts. ‘Where next?’ he asks.
‘Left at the end of the road. I’m not joking about the drains, Dad.’
‘No one cares. Some local authorities collect information about drainage systems as part of their asset-management plans. Others don’t hold any detailed information. They haven’t got time to protect people’s homes; they’re too busy fixing speed cameras to traffic lights and handing out parking tickets.’
‘Take the next right. Keep going. I read about this town in Australia – it was deliberately flooded by its local government. Stop by the next lamp post.’
‘The Environment Agency did it in York a few years ago.’ Chris pulls over again and glances at James, face partially lit by the light they’re stopped under. ‘What? You thought things like that didn’t happen here? Only a tenth of floodplains are fit for purpose. It’s a mess.’
‘You think everything’s a mess,’ James says as he jumps out again, not giving Chris an opportunity to reply.
These quiet streets by the park are flanked by Victorian houses and developments for the over sixties. He watches as water steals down the road, crossing the drowned mouths of drains. But for the odd Christmas tree and occasional strings of outdoor lights, the houses remain in darkness. Chris thinks of the people, still sleeping, or sipping coffee in kitchens and dining rooms that face back gardens, unaware of what is happening around the front. Unprepared, too, he suspects. Serves them right for not thinking about the future. Some of them may have walked past him in town, preoccupied by Christmas, when there are more important things to consider. He can’t wait to get home and fill the sandbags. Get them stacked and shut everyone in, safe and sound.
Remembering what Emma said about not causing waves, Chris drives slowly once James returns. Still, his wheels part the water, sending it up dropped kerbs and over pavement edges where it licks walls and slinks under metal gates. He recalls the builder who dug a moat around his house several years ago. The photographs were everywhere. The house, a three-storey red-brick affair with detached garage, sat on a turf island in the middle of the flooded Somerset Levels. Might Chris have tried something similar? He could have hired a mini excavator and dug a circle around the house – double digging on a grand scale! But it rains on the just and unjust, and it rains on the inside and outside of moats; Chris can’t see how a makeshift barricade would save them from standing water caused by further rain.
The steering seems off as Chris crawls along the middle of the road. Leaden, and tugging to the left. He pulls up, gets out, and walks round to the passenger wheel. The rain slaps his back as he bends, digging in his pocket for his phone. The torch reveals the problem: several roofing nails spear the tyre. There’s no spare. He never replaced the one that was stolen. But Emma bought him a repair kit that he keeps in the van. The sealant should reinflate the tyre enough so he can drive home, though he may be better off staying put and seeing if someone will come out to him.
‘Give me your bag,’ he says to James. ‘Tell me where to go, and I’ll finish your round. You stay here in the dry.’
Rain hammering his hunched shoulders, Chris trudges down avenues and alleyways, along crescents and closes, until the fluorescent bag is empty of papers. Then he heads back to the van where he sits in the driver’s seat, water streaming from his elbows, trousers suctioned to his calves and thighs, as he searches his phone for the number of an old customer.
‘Sorry to call so early, it’s Chris Abram, I used to cut your lawn … Yeah, fine thanks. I’ve driven over some roofing nails and I’m stuck, not far from Hesketh Park. Hang on a sec.’ He presses the speaker icon so he can hold the phone away from his dripping face. ‘I was wondering—’
‘Get your spare on and bring the tyre over in, say, about an hour.’
‘There’s no spare.’
‘What’ve you got, then?’
‘Sealant foam.’
‘Ah, we don’t fix tyres if they’ve been inflated with that stuff. Use it, and you’re looking at a new tyre.’
‘Which will set me back …?’
‘Still got the same van?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Somewhere in the region of a hundred quid.’
‘How about a roadside repair?’
‘No chance today, mate. It’ll be after Christmas before we can get to you, now.’
‘All right.’ Chris sighs. ‘But it might be repairable?’
‘Might be, yeah. Depends how central the repairs are. Hopefully, you didn’t pinch the sidewall between the rim and the road. Did you drive far?’
Chris thinks. The nails were probably in the gutter outside the old bloke’s house – his neighbour had scaffolding up. ‘Not too far,’ he says.
‘All right. I’ll give you a call first thing on the twenty-seventh and we’ll sort something out. I’ve been meaning to ask, by the way – you know those living walls? The missus has been going on about them. What would you grow on one?’
‘Um, I’d probably go for wild strawberries, thyme, lambs lettuce, oregano …’ Chris glances at the floor mat, where he is making a significant puddle. He and James will have to hang their clothes over the bath and run the dehumidifier when they get home. ‘Or, if you don’t want to grow food, you could try perennials: spotted deadnettle, fuchsia, evergold – probably best to think of a colour scheme and go from there.’
‘Cheers. Oh, and borders – is there a particular trick to getting them looking nice all year round?’
‘Tell you what, why don’t I pop round and have a look?’
‘Nah, I’m just asking.’
‘Raising them can help in weather like this,’ Chris says flatly. ‘You want them multi-layered. Underplant each bed so when something dies off, the new stuff comes into season, taking its place. And think about it, logically. If you like tulips, pick a narrow-leafed kind. Then the leaves won’t cover and smother whatever you’ve got coming up next.’
‘Cheers, I’ll tell the missus. Speak to you on the twenty-seventh.’
Chris puts the phone back in his pocket and stares at the rain teeming down the windscreen.
‘You should have asked him a few things, Dad.’
‘Like what?’
‘Oh, I don’t know. Like, “Where’s the cheapest tyre place in town?” And, “Do you know someone who might come out before the twenty-seventh?”’
Chris smiles. ‘Right,’ he says. ‘We’re going to have to walk home. Your mother won’t be happy with me …’
‘Grandad used to do that: “Oh, Nan won’t be happy if you do this, or that,” when it was really him who was unhappy. Maybe you don’t want us to get wetter?’
‘All right,’ Chris says tetchily. ‘I don’t want us to get wetter. There. Now, let’s go.’
Off they set in the sopping dark of Christmas Eve morning. Past the park and then all the way down Roe Lane, until they reach the roundabout and cross on to Moss Lane, shoulders hunched, feet plunging through puddles. As they walk, James breaks the hush with humming, occasionally allowing words to break through.
‘Hum-hum, hum-hum, hum … beneath life’s crushing load, whose forms are bending low.’
‘Oh, cheerful. Where’s that from?’
‘One of Dylan’s playlists: “Miserable Christmas Songs”.’
James smirks and Chris realises his mistake – having commented, he’s as good as requested an accompaniment of dirges.
‘Hum-hum, hum-hum, hum … toil along the climbing way, with painful steps and slow.’
A maintenance vehicle is parked up by the bridge, hazard lights flashing. Chris glances at the red and white water-filled traffic barriers waiting to be unloaded.
‘Looks like they’re finally going to have a go at the potholes,’ he says.
‘Really? Looks like a lot of barriers and not much else.’
‘They’ll only be able to do a throw-and-go job in this weather.’
‘If that’s what they’re doing.’
‘They’ll chuck a few buckets of Ultra Crete at them. Total waste of time.’
‘Oh, cheerful,’ James says.
Chris can’t remember when he was last this wet – in the bath, perhaps. They pass the vehicle and cross the bridge, almost home.
‘Hum, hum-hum, hum … Oh, rest beside the weary road.’
‘I wish you’d give it a rest.’
Dawn isn’t far off. Emma will be busy in the kitchen by now. She slipped a piece of paper under one of the fridge magnets the other day: Think of all the beauty still left around you and be happy – Anne Frank. Chris’s clothes are stuck to him, shiny, like scales. He thinks of the sea rocking along the western edge of town, of the water sneaking up on the sleeping houses by the park, of forgotten mornings walking back from the farm with his father as they talked about the end of the world. How can he be happy, knowing what he knows? No one ever said facts were bliss, did they? It’s ignorance, ignorance that’s bliss.
Janet’s family Christmas starts here, in the Christmas Eve kitchen as she sips the dregs of her coffee.
‘What are your plans for this morning?’ Emma asks.
‘Oh, don’t worry about me. I’ll think of something.’
‘You could run the hoover round the lounge, if you like.’
‘Hmm.’
‘Or you could peel the vegetables for tomorrow and put them in some water.’
‘Oh, I could,’ Janet agrees, though she would prefer the family Christmas to unfurl around her as she looks on in her dressing gown.
Emma reaches into one of the bottom cupboards and retrieves a small chalkboard. ‘Well, I’ve got lots to get ready for the party, so I’ll just …’ She opens a drawer and rummages for a moment, before coming up with a stick of chalk.
‘Oh yes, you mustn’t let me interrupt you.’
Janet waits a while, giving Emma the opportunity to offer her a second cup of coffee or begin an interesting conversation. But Emma writes on the board, face stiff with concentration.
‘I’ll just …’ Janet says as she stands. ‘Oh, don’t worry about me – I’ll just.’
But Emma doesn’t respond.
Upstairs, on the landing, Janet thinks of Dylan, sleeping through the overture to family Christmas. Her own children rarely slept in. Frank used a radio alarm – all his awakenings were communal.
The boys’ bedroom door is pushed to, rather than shut. Janet knocks and waits. No answer. But since she has given fair warning, she pushes it open.
The air is dense with an oniony, teenage musk.
‘Dylan?’
Though it’s going on for eight o’clock, it remains dim outside. Dimmer still in the bedroom, where the blind is closed. Janet feels for the light switch. There. That’s better.
The bed is positioned in the middle of the far wall; there’s just enough space for it before the roof slopes on either side. She can see the hump of Dylan on the top bunk. He groans and his head disappears under the covers.
‘It’s Christmas Eve, Dylan.’
‘I know,’ he replies, voice pained and gravelly.
‘There’re a few things to sort out before the party,’ she says importantly.
‘Now?’
‘Do you want to be Joseph or a shepherd?’
He groans again, and Janet waits.
‘The little ones are being the Wise Men, and I’m going to ask Ruth to be Mary. So it’s either Joseph or the shepherd for you and James. It would be a good idea if you wear your dressing gown. We can have a look for a matching tea towel and fasten it round your head with your dressing-gown belt.’
‘I haven’t got a dressing gown.’
‘Why ever not?’
‘Cos I’m not Sherlock Holmes,’ he mutters. Finally, he moves, pushing the covers back, apparently resigned to getting up. ‘Sorry – I dunno. James hasn’t got one, either. Old people wear dressing gowns. No offence.’
‘None taken,’ she lies.
He yawns, a great sliding sound, the air rushing out of him like a puncture.
‘Once you’ve had a shower,’ Janet says optimistically, ‘I’ll sort you out with a costume. Joseph is the better part. And you’re the oldest. Would you like it?’
‘I don’t have to learn any lines, do I?’
‘Well,’ she begins.
‘I’m not good at remembering stuff. It takes me ages. Once I’ve done it, it sticks like sh— glue. Actually, I was Narrator One in the nativity when I was in Reception.’
‘Oh yes. Grandad and I came to see you.’
‘Hang on.’ Dylan frowns. ‘I think I can remember. And it came to pass in those days, that there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus, that all the world should be taxed.’
‘Very good! We’ll open proceedings with that, shall we?’
‘If you like,’ he says.
And here is some of Janet’s spare love, neatly wrapped and ready to be presented to Dylan. She offers it to him in her heart, like a prayer, and immediately things she never would have accepted from her own children seem amusing. Like the time many years ago when she said, ‘You’re going to be seven, so you’ll get seven candles.’ And Dylan had replied, ‘I’d rather have seven cakes, thank you.’
Janet returns to her room – Chris and Emma’s room, she reminds herself. For the first time since her arrival, the weather outdoors is cool. The house feels colder, too. It doesn’t help that they keep opening the skylight. She reaches up and shuts it and then she sits in the bed, legs under the covers, nice and warm.
How strange it is to be on this end of the Christmas party. In years gone by, she had no part of it until she glimpsed the tree lights shining through the window as Frank pulled on to the drive. When the front door opened, Emma said, ‘Happy Christmas,’ and presented them with non-alcoholic eggnog which they sipped while the grandchildren circled their legs. There was singing: the carols Emma had requested, and a selection of better ones slipped in by Janet. At some point, the cousins would disappear upstairs, eventually re-emerging in an avalanche of silliness. Later, James would hand out his Christmas quiz, full of questions he’d found on the internet, and there was always a game. Last year, the game involved putting together gingerbread houses which Emma had made, flat-pack style, providing bowls of glacé icing in lieu of cement.
This year, it seems such a long wait until mid-afternoon and, for the first time in decades, Janet remembers listening as her mother read ‘The Night Before Christmas’. How she’d ached for the moment when she would be allowed to settle down for a long winter’s nap, finally waking to discover a satsuma, nuts and a new penny in the old sock at the end of her bed.
Janet lifts her Bible from the bedside table and rereads Luke’s account of the Christmas story. How moved she is by the glad tidings of great joy to all people. It won’t be long before her family is here, ready to experience the marvellous story for themselves. Which reminds her, she has costumes to organise. She puts the Bible down, climbs out of the bed and opens the wardrobe. She pulls out folded towels and sheets; her rummaging is for a good cause, and therefore permissible. Everything has been jammed in so tightly, the sheets are crushed like tissue paper. They could do with an iron, she thinks.
Janet sneaks into the sewing room. Emma hasn’t forbidden her presence, it’s just she’s never been invited, hence it feels as though she is trespassing. On the other hand, Emma has said she must make herself at home, several times, and it’s only right to take her at her word. Janet plugs in the iron and drapes the first sheet over the board. Oh, but it’s fitted, and the gathered corners are all wrong for what she had in mind. Still, she’ll iron it as a favour to Emma. The next sheet is also gathered at the corners and no good at all. She irons it, too, her head feeling a little better now she’s up and about, and primed with coffee. A third and fourth sheet are, thankfully, flat and will make passable toga-style robes for James and Dylan. Janet irons the towels as well, just to freshen them up.
Ironing done, Janet inspects the room. She fingers a pile of folded net curtains. Emma buys them from charity shops to make into drawstring bags for fruit and vegetables.
‘People don’t have net curtains any more,’ Emma told her. ‘They’re very old-fashioned.’
Janet has net curtains, but Emma must have forgotten and, not wanting to embarrass herself, as much as Emma, she decided not to mention it.
On the floor, a blue velvet curtain has been flung over a makeshift bed. Janet doesn’t like to think of her son and his wife sleeping separately, especially if it’s a result of her presence. Though she supposes it could be Chris’s occasional crossness that has caused Emma to withdraw. Or maybe Emma’s night-time absence is the cause of Chris’s crossness; men do get terribly cross about these things.
Janet stoops to stroke the soft curtain. It would work for a Wise Man, but Janet’s three Wise Men, like Jesus’s, will arrive prepared. Mary, then, she thinks. Yes, she can see it draped over Ruth’s shoulders. Complemented by a white towel, tied with something silvery. There are rolls of ribbon on the bookcase. Janet is certain Emma wouldn’t mind if she just … There: she selects a white ribbon with silver edging and lifts the velvet from the floor. Having been wrapped around Emma during the night, it is crumpled. She places it on the ironing board and heats the iron again. When Janet can hear the water spitting, she runs the iron over the velvet, a big steaming sweep, from one end of the board to the other. And, oh dear, she has somehow flattened the soft blue pile. She must have ironed in the wrong direction. Velvet is funny, isn’t it? Stroke it one way and it stands up, stroke it the other and it lies down. Janet moves the iron back, this time from right to left, but fails to resurrect the pile. She puts the iron down and uses her hand; perhaps it takes fingers to right the tufts. But no, the tufts can’t be righted. She has seared an arc into Emma’s curtain.
Her instinct is to hide it. That would be wrong, though. She unplugs the iron, folds the velvet over her arm and heads downstairs.
‘I was getting things ready for the nativity,’ she tells Emma’s back. ‘Finding something for Ruth. To be Mary. Smoothing out some wrinkles. But there’s been a small, um, hitch.’
Emma turns and approaches, arms raised, her hands crusted with flour and flecks of pastry.
‘Ah yes, I see.’ Emma swallows. ‘You can’t iron … I’m sure you didn’t mean … You weren’t to know.’
‘Was it very expensive?’
‘One of Chris’s old ladies gave it to him.’
‘Oh, thank goodness!’
It’s a relief Emma isn’t upset. Velvet, Janet decides, is probably as old-fashioned as net curtains. Now Emma will surely say, ‘Sit down and I’ll make you a drink,’ or ‘You must tell me about Christmases when Chris was a boy.’ Janet stands, the material draped over her arm, anticipating Emma’s orders like a waiter.
‘Would you mind popping the curtain back in the sewing room?’
Of course Janet wouldn’t mind. Not a bit. Not at all.
How hard it is to feel at home while away from home. And how hard it is to feel at home when home alone. In the first scenario, Janet must manage without comforts; in the second, without company. And up here, in the room that seemed welcoming earlier but has inexplicably grown plain and chilly, Janet is without either.
It’s boredom that has her standing on tiptoe and feeling around the top shelf of the wardrobe for the letter from the hospital. A present falls out, unattractively wrapped in newspaper – no doubt one of Emma’s environmental ideas. The paper rips as the present’s corner hits the floor. Janet doesn’t mean to look, but she can hardly help it – when she picks it up and attempts to smooth the paper, it only tears further. The present is a road atlas. Odd, she thinks, given everyone’s dependence on computers. She’ll have to find Emma’s sticky tape and fix the paper. She reaches up again, feeling for the letter. She ought to have kept it in the bedside drawer. There hadn’t been any need to place it so high when she was hiding it from no one but herself. Unable to find it, she is filled with an irrational fear that it is lost. Of course it isn’t, but there is no one to tell her so, and the longer it takes to discover the sharp corner of the envelope and the wrinkled plastic of its see-through window, the more worried Janet feels, until she steps up into the wardrobe itself, in order to achieve a little more height and, as she tiptoes at her new elevation, everything wobbles. Janet grasps the top shelf and the wardrobe leans, as if offering itself up to her. Items slide out: presents, shoes, a tiny pair of filmy knickers. She staggers back on to the carpet and extends both hands to stop the wardrobe from falling forward, but she is not strong enough to right it, and it slumps on her, drunkenly, doors open like spread arms, spewing its insides all over the carpet.
Dylan saves her. She hears the thud as he jumps from his bunk, appearing in the doorway, unshowered but nonetheless welcome.
‘Fuck, Nan!’ he shouts, diving into the room, where he replaces Janet in front of the reeling wardrobe.
Janet sits heavily on the bed, too mortified to tell him off.
‘Fetch Mum,’ he says.
But before she can get to her feet, the front door opens and the rain suddenly sounds in stereo: above them on the bedroom skylight and below them on the wind that whips into the hall. It must be Chris and James, finally back from their early-morning excursion – whatever can have taken them so long?
‘DAD!’ Dylan calls.
Chris’s feet trudge up the stairs, quickening once he sees Dylan propping up the wardrobe, torn between trying to balance it so nothing more falls out, and causing further damage by righting it.
Chris is soaked. Janet can hear the water dripping off him. His feet squelch as he relieves Dylan of the wardrobe, the responsibility of righting it, along with any further spillages and damage, now his.
Righted, the wardrobe leans. The joints between top and side, and bottom and side, no longer make right angles; the wardrobe has morphed from rectangle to parallelogram. One of the doors hangs off, and the beading along its bottom has come unstuck.
Janet offers Chris one of the towels she ironed earlier.
‘I’ll go and get the tools,’ he says, ignoring her outstretched arm.
While Chris is gone, Dylan picks everything off the floor: the newspaper-wrapped presents, the cards, the filmy underwear – how he groans! – and places it all in a pile on the bed. Janet sees the hospital letter, stuck to the partially opened tab of a padded envelope. Once they’ve all gone, she’ll retrieve it and place it in the drawer of the bedside table.
Dylan leaves as Chris returns with a large metal toolbox, a drill and some small off-cuts of wood. Emma follows, face flushed.
‘God, look at the state of the wall,’ she says.
Behind the wardrobe, a niche which must have once been home to an airing cupboard is speckled by black mould. Janet thinks of Chris’s comments about the fire. It would make the room damp, he said. But she only has a few minutes of heat before bed each night. This damp must be historic. It’s not surprising given the way they keep opening the window in this weather.
‘I’ll scrub it and slather it with bathroom paint next week,’ Emma says.
‘I’ll clean it,’ Janet volunteers. It’s not how she had intended to spend the morning, but she can’t help putting herself last, it’s just the way she is.
‘There’s really no need,’ Emma replies.
Janet’s appetite for cleaning the wall increases. Plus, if she remains upstairs, she can talk to Chris while he fixes the wardrobe. She hurries out of the room and down the stairs to the kitchen, where she can smell mince pies browning in the oven, and one of the worktops has been taken over by something called a ‘HOT CHOCOLATE STATION’ according to the chalkboard. There aren’t any disinfectant wipes in the cupboard below the sink, so she grabs the dishcloth and hurries back upstairs.
Chris is alone in the room when she returns, plugging his phone into a charger behind the bedside table.
Janet sits on the bed and watches as he places a small, square block of wood into the wardrobe’s top left corner. He drills a hole though the side of the wardrobe and into the block.
‘Can you get me a chair from the boys’ room, Mum?’
Janet does as he asks and then, balancing on the chair in a hunching crouch because of the low ceiling, Chris drills another hole, this time through the wardrobe’s roof and into the top of the wooden block.
Janet squeezes past with the cloth.
‘Mum, you can’t wipe the mould,’ Chris says, manually twisting a screw into first one drilled hole and then the other. ‘It needs scrubbing. With a brush. And we’ll have to get the dehumidifier on.’
‘No harm in trying.’
Janet wipes the wall to the accompaniment of Chris’s laboured breath and the give of the wood as he twists the screwdriver.
‘Got these little bits leftover from when I built a bird table,’ he says.
‘That’s nice, dear.’
‘Knew they’d come in handy.’
‘Your father would have done the same.’
Chris makes an agreeing sound.
‘You know, when your father nearly died, he saw the—’
‘Oh, Mum. Not this again.’
Janet searches for the right words. She can tell Chris is getting impatient; he always does when she pauses for inspiration. ‘What do you think happened to your father, then?’
‘I don’t know.’ Chris lowers the screwdriver and hunkers on the chair. ‘He fell off the roof, and while he was unconscious, he was fighting for the surface, like people do when they’re drowning. The firing of synapses in his brain created a surge of energy – a bright light. That’s the simplest explanation. Afterwards, when he tried to make sense of it, the experience was filtered via his rational brain and it became something else; a story he—’
‘You think your father’s brain made it all up to fool him?’ Janet asks. Oh, she knows she should turn the other cheek, but it is very hard to do so.
‘No, that’s not what I said.’ Chris exhales. ‘Dad’s not here any more, so you don’t need to take his side.’
He scrambles off the chair and she can see the boy in him, braced for a telling-off.
‘God hasn’t finished with you, yet,’ she says.
‘Why does that sound like a threat?’
‘Just because you’ve rejected Him, it doesn’t mean He has rejected you.’
‘OK, Mum.’
Chris glances at the pile of things Dylan placed on the bed. He picks up the padded envelope and removes her hospital letter from its sticky flap. Then he drops her letter back on the bed and looks inside the padded envelope, eyebrows raised.
‘Should you be poking your nose in Emma’s Christmas arrangements?’
He turns his attention to the newspaper-wrapped present with the torn corner and peels it back, revealing its contents. ‘Emma promised not to buy me anything, but this is just the thing,’ he says. ‘We’re far too dependent on phones.’
‘You shouldn’t be opening it!’ Janet drops the cloth, shoos him out of the way and begins rearranging the pile. If she takes charge of it, she can reclaim her—
‘There’s a letter here for you, Mum.’
‘Yes.’ She holds out her hand.
‘You haven’t opened it.’
‘No.’
His expression is fleetingly puzzled; then he places his foot on the chair and lifts the screwdriver.
‘I don’t want you worrying about me!’
He returns his foot to the floor. ‘Is there a problem?’
‘It’s from the doctor.’
Janet sits on the edge of the bed and tells him about her morning headaches, the nausea, the dizziness and her problems with concentration. How it happened the previous winter, and is happening again now.
‘Sunlight might help. Are you getting out and about? Some people just feel bad in the winter. It’s a thing, isn’t it?’
Poor Chris, he doesn’t realise the gravity of the situation.
‘I had a brain scan.’
She lets it sink in and waits for him to ask about the results. He must be anxious to know, but he holds back. And it seems cruel to leave the envelope unopened when it’s in her power to reassure him. Full of love for her son, Janet tears the paper.
Her eyes search for alarming words: ‘tumour’, ‘aneurism’, ‘dementia’. And they discover ‘normal’. She reads the surrounding sentences – there are only three in all. Normal. There is nothing wrong with her.
The doctors have seen inside her head, and everything is in order. How strange that she must be told this; it’s her head, after all – you’d think she might know what was in it.
It’s a little like the final judgement, she realises. When it is her time – not now, thank goodness! – the Lord will look in her heart and see whether everything is in order.
And, oh, the news takes her breath away for a moment. Many years ago, the Lord welcomed Lazarus back to life, saying, ‘Lazarus come forth!’ Today, he has, in effect, welcomed her back to life, saying, ‘Janet, come forth!’ What a relief. What a blessing for the whole family.
‘It’s really good news, Mum,’ Chris says.
How thankful he is! Men aren’t good at expressing these things, but she could always tell with Frank, sensing the heartfelt words he would have said, if he’d been able. Nearly always. Mostly always, she thinks. And now, if she is not careful, those long-sunk thoughts will bob up like corks.
Chris moves the chair and starts drilling again. Janet resumes her wiping, experiencing a pang of regret at the loss of her licence to daydream. How she had enjoyed contemplating funerals. Did she want the mourners wearing black to reflect the solemnity of the occasion or in bright colours to reflect her warmth? There were pluses on both sides, of course. Would there be hot food afterwards or just sandwiches and nibbles? Should the gathering be held in a restaurant or in Ruth and Rob’s newly converted living space? There had been so much to consider.
The mould isn’t coming off as well as she had hoped. The wall is quite smeary – grey now, rather than speckled. And the sound of Chris’s drill as he makes new holes is restoring her earlier headache.
Emma pokes her head around the door. ‘Chris can finish off up here. I’ve got a special job for you, Janet, if you wouldn’t mind?’
A request made in such a forthright manner is hard to refuse. So, no, Janet wouldn’t mind at all. Not a bit. It would be her absolute pleasure.
She follows Emma down the stairs. The kitchen door is open, and she can see the boys, helping themselves to mince pies, juggling hot mouthfuls between puffs, greedily accepting pain alongside the pleasure.
‘It’ll be nice to have some live Christmas music while we get everything ready, won’t it, boys?’ Emma calls.
The boys step into the hall, nodding: Oh yes, it’s just what they’d like.
‘These two are off upstairs to tidy up before the cousins arrive. But I’m sure they’d love to listen for a moment.’
Knowing how much she will please everyone, Janet agrees. She plays a few bars of the ‘Hallelujah Chorus’, before pausing to tell them that it must be sung standing up, a tradition accidentally begun by George III, when the trumpets frightened him out of a nap and he jumped to his feet, followed by the deferential audience that believed his standing indicated pleasure. The boys like that, though they creep away when she starts playing again, first for more mince pies – she hears the noisy chomping – and then upstairs to their room where their efforts at tidying sound very much like wrestling, until James starts to cough and Chris shouts across the landing telling them to pack it in.
Not long after Chris has finished drilling, the power goes out and the keyboard is silenced. It’s a terrible shame, but how fortunate that he was able to fix everything first.
It’s important to be thankful, Janet tells Emma who is panicking about the food. There are nine food-related miracles in the Bible that Janet can think of, off the top of her head, and she begins to describe them, in some detail, until Emma interrupts to say Chris has a box of batteries in the garage.
What a blessing! Some of the food may not get cooked, and candlelight will have to suffice, but at least there will be music.
Chris appears with the batteries. They find the right ones and Janet plays for a while longer, wearing them in. But then, feeling removed from the heart of things and worried she is missing out, she abandons her post and, instead, wanders from room to room, offering advice and instruction, ensuring the day unfolds with herself at its heart.
‘I’m not making any lunch. It isn’t long ’til the party. I thought people could just help themselves to a little snack if they’re hungry.’
‘I see.’
‘Would you like me to make you something?’
‘Oh, you’re busy.’
Emma places a big bar of chocolate and a knife and fork on the dining table. She pokes her head around the kitchen door and calls, ‘Dylan! Come and get the stuff for the chocolate game.’ Turning back to Janet she says, ‘What would you like?’
‘Oh no, it’s all right.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Are you having something?’
It occurs to Emma that this is a test; she is meant to guess what Janet wants, and her inability to do so confirms to Janet that she is unloved and misunderstood.
‘No, I’m going to wait.’
‘If you’re not having anything, I won’t either.’
‘Well, I’m going to hoover the lounge, but please, help yourself to anything. Treat the kitchen like your own,’ Emma says, regretting it as she remembers the knickers in the sink.
‘You won’t be able to cook the gingerbread,’ Chris says.
Emma looks at the raw shapes on the baking trays. ‘I thought a biscuit nativity would be just the thing. Your mum would have loved it. And the children could have iced their own characters.’
She consults her list, trying to work out what can be done without power and what must be abandoned.
‘We’ll stitch the trotters instead,’ Chris says.
‘No,’ she snaps.
‘I’ve put them on a plate on the side. They’ll be defrosted by the time everyone gets here.’
‘We are not—’
‘The boys will love it.’
She glances at Chris, wondering whether she is missing something. He can’t be pleased about the power outage.
‘It’s a Christmas party, not a survival course. And your mother won’t love it. Anyway, the electric could come back on at any minute. That’s why I’ve left the trays out – the instant it’s back, I’ll stick them in the oven with the quiches and the cheese straws. Will you go out and check the rabbits?’
When Chris doesn’t reply, she turns. He is holding a padded envelope.
‘It was on the bed, with everything that fell out of the wardrobe.’ He places it on the worktop, beside the Mason jars of goodies that make up her HOT CHOCOLATE STATION. ‘I assume you were keeping it safe?’
‘I was keeping James safe.’
‘Me too.’
Emma’s instinct – and that is all she can rely on when dealing with this since she lacks know-how – is to offer placation; to validate his worries while emphasising James’s good health, despite his present cold. But it is exhausting to constantly urge herself to reasonableness, prioritising Chris’s feelings over her own, applying words like balm. She doesn’t understand how legitimate worries about local closures and the increasing difficulty of securing doctors’ appointments have led him to online forums where foreigners without health insurance write favourable reviews of unregulated antibiotics. He is a gardener – what does he know about spectrum, dose and side effects? She can’t say that; any mention of his job will be perceived as a criticism of the business and only distract from the matter in hand.
‘I think—’ she begins.
‘Did you know British children are more likely to die from asthma than children anywhere else in Europe?’
‘Chris, you’re catastrophising.’ Emma’s shoulders slump and she leans against the worktop, drained and frustrated. ‘James has spent three nights in hospital since he was born. And one of those admissions was for croup. He has never come close to dying.’
What to say, now? Emma can’t think; she is running on empty and, instead of soothing him, she points to the envelope.
‘That is a red line,’ she says, surprised at the fierceness in her voice.
‘A red line?’
‘It’s completely unacceptable.’
‘I know what red line means.’
‘Is everything all right?’ Janet asks, tiptoeing theatrically into the kitchen, still wearing her dressing gown. ‘You want to get out of those wet clothes, Chris.’
‘He’ll get changed in a minute. We’re just popping outside to check on the rabbits.’
Water seeps into Emma’s trainers the moment she steps outside.
‘What a day!’ she says, fastening her coat and raising her hood. She waves her arms at everything: the flooded patio, the leaden weeping sky, the house without power, again. ‘It’s one thing after another!’
‘Well, it’s not like we can say, “Oh, we’ll take a flood, as long as we don’t have to endure any other inconveniences.” Remember the film we watched? The pandemic one? It showed how normal stuff goes wrong at the same time as large-scale stuff.’
Ah, yes, the mockumentary with the ludicrous woman crying over her washing. Emma won’t comment; she doesn’t want to encourage further discussion of it.
‘You can’t imagine a flood, can you?’ Chris says.
Emma would like to deny it, but he is right, she can’t, not really. In theory, yes. But in practice, no. Even though the water in which she is standing is over the tips of her trainers and her socks are already wet, she can’t imagine it seeping into the house, rolling across the kitchen floor and into the hall. The wind is blowing a ripple through it and the sky continues to lob rain at them, but she can’t shake the thought that the threats are idle, and an in-the-nick-of-time adjournment will save them all.
‘Weird, isn’t it?’ he says. ‘You’re the one who reads books, who’s always going on about empathy. But you can’t picture it.’
‘It’ll be spring soon, and then—’
‘By February we’ll have bees, hill fires and cherry blossom, if recent years are anything to go by. Fruit trees need a period of dormancy like we need sleep, or they flower at the wrong time and, bam – no fruit. It won’t be long before we have a summer with an ice-free Arctic, and that’ll increase the warming we’re causing with our CO2 emissions by fifty per cent. Game over.’
Emma places a hand on his shoulder. ‘Remember your dad, always quoting Job? How did it go? For there is hope of a tree …’
Chris exhales. ‘… if it be cut down, that it will sprout again, and that the tender branch thereof will not cease. Though the root thereof wax old in the earth, and the stock thereof die in the ground; Yet through the scent of water it will bud—’
‘—and bring forth boughs like a plant,’ she says, finishing it for him. ‘You’re abandoning hope.’
‘I am.’
‘All right.’ She stuffs her hands in her coat pockets and glances at the spruce sitting on the patio, thoroughly killed, simultaneously dehydrated and drowned. She looks away, past the grass and the meadow, and fixes her gaze on the fruit trees at the boundary. ‘The space where your hope was, can we fill it with something less concrete? How about wishes?’
He snorts, and she leaves it, following him to the hutch where he unfastens the latch of Boy Rabbit’s first-floor living quarters and lifts him out. She watches as he soothes the rabbit and, for a moment, he is the old Chris, the man who could do things she couldn’t imagine her dad doing: operate an excavator, build a fence, bleed a radiator. In the face of his practicality, her knowledge of the world seemed abstract and remote. Wanting to share some of the things she knew, Emma used to read to him in the car. Over a period of months she read Tess of the d’Urbervilles, and when he asked questions about the novel, she offered expansive, definitive answers, the lack of overlap in their skills giving her a false confidence. It occurs to her now, as she watches him examining Boy Rabbit, his expression one of growing alarm that, on occasion, he may have done the same.
‘You hold him,’ Chris says.
She is not good at holding the rabbits. She is too cautious; they sense her uncertainty and, feeling insecure, struggle. Indifferent to her hesitancy, Chris bundles Boy Rabbit into her arms.
Emma clasps his warm body. Her coat is wet; it can’t be comfortable being pressed to it. She hunches forward to protect him from the rain, and then they are face to face and she is studying the deep Y of his nose, the trellised veins inside his ears and the wiry white whiskers on his cheeks and above his eyes.
Crouching in front of her, Chris examines Boy Rabbit’s hindquarters.
‘I think it’s fly strike.’
‘What’s that?’
‘Flies lay their eggs on dirty rabbits and when the maggots hatch, they eat through the tissues. I can see maggots on the surface of his skin. I think they’re under it, too. There’s a sort of ripple.’
Emma shudders and her grip loosens. Boy Rabbit struggles and his motoring hind legs tear at the backs of her hands.
Chris lifts him out of her arms and places him back in his first-storey living quarters. Sickened, Emma retreats to the back door where the house offers a smidgen of shelter from the rain. Hands stinging, she searches her phone briefly and then reads aloud.
‘It’s vital rabbits are kept dry … Many owners think fly strike doesn’t happen in winter months; however, it can happen at any time … Rabbits should be checked daily – Well, I’ve been out here every day. Soiled bedding should be removed daily – Daily? I had no idea … If you find a maggot on your rabbit you must take him to the vet immediately—’
‘Oh, that is not happening,’ Chris interrupts, suddenly less sanguine about simultaneous large- and small-scale misfortunes. ‘I’m not paying to have him put down.’
‘Fly strike is an emergency …’ Emma reads.
‘We should have cleaned his bum.’
‘He lives outdoors; I thought it was natural for him to be a bit dirty – I didn’t know!’
‘That’s no excuse, though, is it?’
‘Are you serious? You bought the rabbits, without asking—’
‘So, now I have to ask you before I spend—’
‘—and just expected me to look after them.’
‘—my money, which I earn.’
‘Your money?’
‘Go and get your tweezers.’
‘It is not your money,’ Emma calls as she turns and splashes back to the house. She hurries through the kitchen and passes the lounge, catching a glimpse of Janet sitting on the sofa, keyboard resting on her lap. Emma takes the stairs two at a time, accompanied by the ‘Hallelujah Chorus’.
This will be one of those stories, she thinks as she grapples with the make-up bag on the floor beside her makeshift bed. It will be told on subsequent Christmas Eves and everyone will sigh and think how the passage of time is a kind of alchemy, allowing past troubles to transmogrify into anecdotes. Didn’t James tell her, not long ago, that humans, when narrating experiences, tend to discount their duration and instead remember only two things: a peak moment and an end moment, ultimately assessing experiences according to their average. Childbirth, James said, was a good example of this, and Emma had been touched by the odd combination of knowledge and absolute ignorance with which he spoke. Here was the baby whose birth caused her so much pain, having a conversation with her about the mechanism by which she had probably forgotten it. And he was right, to a large extent. The end product – James – and the subsequent love and care of her family had induced a kind of forgetfulness that can only be undone by painstaking recollection.
She finds the tweezers and simultaneously catches a glimpse of herself in the mirrored lid of the make-up bag: face grey, eyes like fried eggs.
Outside, she hands the tweezers to Chris.
‘Get him out then,’ he says.
She lifts Boy Rabbit and tries to cradle him. He doesn’t like it and pedals his fore and hind legs, catching her hands again. The added sting brings tears to her eyes.
‘Shouldn’t he be sedated before we do this?’ she says, struggling to keep hold of him. ‘In the piece I was just reading it says—’
‘Hold him still.’
‘—a vet should—’
‘Tighter. So he doesn’t wriggle.’
‘I’m trying.’
‘Try harder.’
‘I’m. Trying.’
‘This is going nowhere.’ Chris feels in his pocket for the key. ‘I’ll get a broom handle.’
At first, she thinks he plans to sweep Boy Rabbit. She can’t think why but, painfully aware of her ignorance, the idea is fleetingly plausible until it hits her: he said broom handle – he is going to fetch one of the redundant handles from her dismantled signs. Then he is going to lay Boy Rabbit on the flooded patio and break his neck.
If the antibiotics were a red line, this is something else entirely, and all the discomfort Emma has swallowed over the past days and months – the strange ideas and incremental indignities, rise to the back of her throat like vomit. She presses Boy Rabbit to her body, refusing to give him up.
‘I’ll take him to the vet,’ she says, turning her back on Chris, who surely can’t think she’ll stand by as he kills the creature. ‘I won’t let you. Not here. On Christmas Eve. You don’t know what you’re doing. He might be fine. There’s a vet not far from where the library was. I’ll take him there.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ he says, face set, not heading for the garage now, instead extending his arms to receive Boy Rabbit.
Emma has never smacked her sons. Once, on returning from a classmate’s birthday party, tired and grumpy, she shouted at her dad because he wouldn’t let her eat a napkin-wrapped slice of cake and, before she knew it, he’d braced his leg on the arm of the sofa and thrown her over his thigh. Her party dress tipped over her head and he battered her backside with the flat of his hand until her mother stopped him. It can’t have been about cake, Emma realises now. But at the time, bent over her father’s leg, head upside down, legs thrashing helplessly, she thought only of herself. Bewildered and inconsolable, she’d been put straight to bed. The memory is lurid and disturbing; she could never do that to someone.
So, when she shoulder-barges Chris, Emma is as surprised as he is. And though it’s a futile, ineffectual assault, she is desperately aware of having stepped outside the conventions of their relationship. Here is the man she elected to love and cherish until the end of everything, recoiling in surprise. Here is the cusp of her already sore shoulder, bemoaning the contact with his ribs. Here is the unwelcome certainty of her hypocrisy – if he rammed her, she may not forgive him.
She isn’t expecting Chris to retaliate. But he does. Hard. And, unable to extend her arms because they are full of rabbit, Emma topples backwards, elbows smacking the patio.
Feet scrambling, she propels herself back. Chris advances and she kicks out at him, stomach pitching with the bewildering upside-down fear she last felt decades ago. Her jumper blots the water seeping through her coat. The backs of her legs are saturated and fingers of wet meet around her ankles and knees like manacles.
‘For fuck’s sake, Em.’ Chris extends a hand which she can’t take without relinquishing her hold on the rabbit. ‘Get up,’ he snaps.
Finally scared of the man whose own fear has so disrupted her life, Emma drives herself farther with her feet. Embarrassed by the depth and speed of her breath, she can feel her face making grotesque shapes as she wonders what to do next.
‘If it doesn’t stop raining, the house is going to flood,’ he shouts. ‘And you’re lying in a puddle, crying about a rabbit.’
Chris turns and splashes through the water to the garage where he unlocks one of the doors and steps inside. Emma scrabbles to her feet and shuttles Boy Rabbit back to his living quarters. She stumbles across the patio and grabs the garage door. The key remains in the lock and, quick as she can, she pulls the door closed, turns the key, and pockets it.
Chris yells. And swears. She hears him thrashing about in the dark. There’ll be a torch somewhere – he’ll find it, eventually.
He shouts again.
Guts watery with fear, Emma lumbers into the recently cleared gap between the fence and the garage. Elbows aching, bleeding hands held over her mouth to catch the noise, she sobs. This can’t be undone. She can’t take it back unless she opens the garage right now and makes a joke of it, pretending everything is OK. But her legs won’t take the steps; she knows Chris will kill Boy Rabbit if she lets him out.
And he pushed her. He pushed her hard.
Hot tears line her cheeks, dribbling over her hands where they mingle with mucus and cold splats of rain. The climate of her marriage has been changing, and she has been in denial about it for a long time. She has ignored the warning signs, preferring not to think about them, failing to act until this crisis moment.
Chris kicks the doors. Not too hard – he won’t want to damage them, will he? It’s not as if they can afford replacements. Can he unfasten the hinges? she wonders. And then she remembers his toolbox, up in the bedroom. He’s not going anywhere for now.
Emma wipes her face with her sopping coat sleeves before splashing across the patio and into the house. The boxes in which the rabbits arrived are in the garage. She’ll have to use something else. She steps into the bathroom, upends a washing basket and picks a towel from the jumble on the floor. Back in the kitchen, she covers the basket’s bottom with the towel and rips a binbag from the roll as her breath erupts in a burst of the tremors that follow tears.
Outside, she removes Girl Rabbit from her side of the hutch and tries to examine her bottom.
Dylan interrupts her. ‘All right, Mum?’ he shouts, head poking out of the back door.
She wonders whether he saw anything, and if he did, how much. ‘Yes!’ she calls, her voice thin and wobbly.
‘Good,’ he replies.
Emma clears her throat and tries to sound normal. ‘I just need to take Boy Rabbit to the vet.’
‘Is he OK?’
‘That’s what I need to find out. Keep Nan busy, will you? I – We won’t be long,’ she says, hoping her belated correction will prevent him from enquiring as to Chris’s whereabouts.
Dylan makes a grumbling sound and then checks himself. ‘All right,’ he says, and closes the door.
Girl Rabbit looks fine. Emma returns her to her living quarters and places Boy Rabbit in the washing basket. She carries him through the side gates to the front of the house where her car is parked on the drive. She wraps the passenger seatbelt around the washing basket, smooths the binbag over the driver’s seat and sits down.
She has already positioned the car to turn right when she notices a ‘ROAD CLOSED’ sign and a line of red and white barriers blocking the bridge. There was talk, back in the autumn, of a leaking water main and a crack in the concrete; perhaps it was true. Emma sighs and reverses a little. She will turn left and make a diversion across the ditch-flanked tracks that dissect the sodden fields.
Before she pulls out, she stares into Boy Rabbit’s unblinking eyes. He is an inconvenience she would prefer to ignore, but there’s a big difference between disliking something and wishing it dead. Lately, she doesn’t much like Chris.
The vet’s waiting room smells of antiseptic and pelt. Ahead of Emma, a young bloke holds a wooden carry case with a silhouette of a ferret burned into its lid and a woman rocks a puppy like a hairy baby. Emma waits, holding the washing basket.
Paper chains have been taped to the reception desk and a tree decorated with cut-outs of animal paw prints stands in front of a pair of windows, rain streaming down the panes as George Michael sings about last Christmas. Conversation in the waiting room is urgent and anxious, and focused on the weather.
‘Grange Road’s under water.’
‘Higher river levels and isolated areas of surface-water flooding are likely for the next day or two – that’s what it said in the paper. Isolated areas. Try not to worry.’
‘It’s up over the pavements on Balmoral Drive.’
‘How’s Preston New Road? It often gets bad there, by the playing fields.’
‘It is bad. I couldn’t see the kerb in places when I passed, earlier. Doesn’t seem very isolated if you ask me.’
Still shaky from the altercation with Chris, and anxious to get home, Emma tries not to listen. She has become somewhat inured to Chris’s catastrophic litanies, but the fears of these ordinary-looking people, sitting beside their poorly pets, are troubling.
The receptionist is an animal person. Emma can tell because her black trousers and cardigan are covered in tufts of fur. She probably has one of those ‘IF YOU LOVE ANIMALS, DON’T EAT THEM’ stickers in her car. Every so often, she angles her head at a microphone on the desk, presses a button and, with the air of a bingo caller, announces a name.
‘Trixie Smith, that’s Trixie Smith …
‘Chester McLean – it’s your turn – Chester …
‘An-nd Minnie Sedgewick, yes that’s Minnie Sedgewick.’
Emma is surprised at the camaraderie and lack of formality – it seems animal lovers don’t bother with Mr and Mrs.
‘Do you have an appointment?’ the receptionist asks when it’s Emma’s turn.
‘No, I – I think it’s an emergency. I don’t know if you’ve got time to squeeze us in—’
‘Are you already registered?’
‘No.’
‘Surname?’
‘Abram.’
‘And your pet?’
‘A rabbit,’ she says, with a little lift of the basket.
‘Aw, let’s have a peek.’
Emma puts the basket on the counter and the receptionist stands.
‘Lovely! Boy or girl?’
‘Boy.’
‘Name?’
The receptionist sits, hands poised over her keyboard. She hasn’t been calling people, Emma realises, swallowing a snigger. She has been announcing the animals and, like children, they have Christian and surnames.
‘He doesn’t have a—’ Emma breaks off as the woman frowns. ‘He’s not a pet.’
‘Well, what is he, then? Ha-ha-ha. You mean he’s not your pet?’
‘No, I—’
‘You found him somewhere, did you? Is that what you’re saying?’
‘No … he’s mine.’ Emma can’t say Boy Rabbit is for meat, so she says the first name that comes to mind. ‘George Michael.’
‘Sorry?’
‘George. Michael.’
‘Your rabbit is called George Michael Abram?’
‘Yes.’
‘Oh, really?’
Emma nods.
The woman jabs her keyboard with her fingertips, simultaneously typing and staring. ‘Your trousers are soaked.’
Emma nods again.
‘Looks like you’ve wet yourself,’ she says.
The vet examines Boy Rabbit’s mouth.
‘We’ve got some malocclusion here. It often corrects itself by the time youngsters are ten weeks old. When it doesn’t, the teeth don’t meet and wear each other down. See? The incisors are overgrown. He’ll have been reluctant to groom.
‘And it looks like he’s had a messy bottom. I suspect his bedding wasn’t changed as often as it might have been?’
The vet is severe now, eyebrows raised, her expression one of chastisement.
‘Have you kept rabbits before?’
‘No.’
‘You should have been better prepared.’
Emma remembers Chris’s contemptuous reference to the Ant and the Grasshopper. In his mind, he is preparing while she wastes her time. It’s all very well being consumed by the idea of everything falling apart, fixating on the moment in which one will be useful and vindicated, but who supplies the everyday needs of food, clothing, shelter, love? Not Chris. Perhaps he thinks those things are beneath him. Or maybe his fear is taking up so much space there’s no room for anything else. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter. She has been filling his gaps with respect to the boys; perhaps she should have realised she would also need to do it for the rabbits. It’s bad enough that to be alive now is to feel a pang of guilt each time she turns the key in the ignition, plugs in the dehumidifier or opens the refrigerator – every action is multiplied; it’s impossible to be one, she is always many. But here is something she could have prevented, all on her own. She holds the thought for a moment. And then resists. Chris did this.
‘I’m afraid it’s not good news, Mrs Abram. Rabbit skin is thin and tears easily. Rather than attempt to remove the maggots, I think the kindest thing would be to put him to sleep.’
Emma listens, face red with shame, as the vet explains what will happen. She accepts the invitation to be present – it’s the least she can do. Trying to save money, she declines the offer of cremation. When it is time, she strokes Boy Rabbit’s head, forcing herself to watch as the blue liquid seeps into his veins. How easy it is to think of oneself as a good person. How hard to acknowledge evidence to the contrary.
‘You can say goodbye to George Michael now, if you like.’
Emma says nothing; any show of emotion could result in tears, nervous laughter or a dreadful combination of both. She waits, lips clamped, until Boy Rabbit is at peace.
‘Have you cleaned the scratches on your hands?’
‘I will.’
The vet holds Emma’s hands and gently wipes them with antiseptic. This small act of compassion is all it takes to prise the lid off her upset. Eyes filling with tears, Emma experiences an unexpected longing for more kindness, which the vet offers, murmuring about sadness, and love, and the difficulty of saying goodbye, until it begins to feel as if she is talking about losing Chris and, weeping now, Emma concurs, half-formed sentences spilling out with her tears.
‘Loved him very much …
‘Certain he was happy …
‘Think you’re on top of things …
‘Exhausting being responsible for …
‘Tried so hard …
‘Hasn’t been enough, has it?’
When she has stopped crying, the vet says, ‘Shall we wrap him in your towel?’
And Emma remembers Boy Rabbit, and the very-much-alive husband she has locked in the garage.
Emma pulls up outside a pair of semi-detached houses. Not content with closing the library, the council declared the building, which first opened as a reading room in December 1920, to be surplus to operational requirements and paid seventy thousand pounds to have it demolished. The plot sat empty for a while. Eventually, a fence was erected and a steel structure appeared behind it. For many months, Emma thought of gallows each time she passed. Now, the houses are finished, and fairy lights sparkle through downstairs windows. With the plot repurposed, she isn’t sure where the library door used to be. She remembers arriving at work after the Christmas break to an enormous pile of books on the other side of the letterbox – it was as if they’d returned on their own like exhausted homing pigeons, and flopped, open-winged, to the floor. Perhaps a sofa or Christmas tree sits where the books once landed.
She thinks of all the objects that have vanished: the old-fashioned toilet with its overhead cistern, the temperamental oil-fuelled boiler, the kitchen’s electric hot-water heater with the external overflow pipe that froze in the winters: one year a two-foot icicle dangled from it. She thinks of the people. The women who borrowed novels while on maternity leave and returned with their babies for Song and Rhyme Time, and Story Time. The children and teens researching homework and coursework. The university students and academics who ordered photocopies of obscure articles and requested inter-library loans. The book group members. The older people who popped in to read the paper, learn IT skills and chat. Those who, struggling to get out and about, said their goodbyes and switched to the Home Visits service.
When closure was mooted and arguments about the benefits of accessible local services were met with indifference, Emma naively imagined there might be some protection in facts and numbers. The library was one of the council’s busiest, and she repeated the figures like a spell: eye of newt, toe of frog, 117,000 reservations, issues and renewals per year. But the library went the way of the maternity unit and children’s A & E services, the Magistrates’ Court and the custody suite at the police station, ‘valueless’ direct trains to nearby cities and the Home Start office down the road that is now a sandwich shop. Order, access to health care, sustainable travel, compassion for those in need – all snatched away, notwithstanding increasingly despairing protests.
She glances at the towel-wrapped body in the washing basket beside her. She paid twenty pounds for the consultation and another twenty-four pounds to put Boy Rabbit to sleep. Chris will be angry about the cost. But Boy Rabbit met a peaceful, dignified end. To remove the trappings of civilisation and treat others badly is to lose one’s humanity. And there is no excuse for that.
The light already dimming, Emma heads for home. Eventually, she approaches the house and pulls into the drive.
She turns off the engine and, in the quiet of the car, is struck by the absence of Christmas lights, and by the outlines of the boys’ bodies, moving behind the lounge window like fish in a bowl.
Emma stands beside the car, passenger door open, staring down at the washing basket and its towel-wrapped quarry, wondering whether it’s OK to leave it outside overnight.
The front door opens to reveal James.
‘What happened to Boy Rabbit?’ he calls.
‘He had to be put down.’
‘Oh no. Was it sad? Where’s Dad?’
‘Yes, it was sad.’ Emma shuts the passenger door while she thinks. ‘He went back to the van for something.’
‘Really?’
‘He … There’s a roadblock on the bridge,’ she says, glancing at James’s feet – he won’t dash out to see for himself in his socks.
‘Oh, right. There was a van there earlier. Dad thought they were doing the potholes. Wait – how did he get past?’
‘He climbed over it,’ she lies.
James laughs and Emma feels a stab of guilt, followed by resignation – Chris’s recent behaviour is to blame for James’s lack of surprise.
‘What he’s gone back for?’
‘The LED beanie,’ she says, stepping up to the house.
James turns on his heel, calling, ‘Hey, Dylan, wait ’til you hear this!’
Emma stands in the doorway. The temperature is due to drop tonight. Boy Rabbit should be all right in the car – he’ll have to be; she doesn’t know what else to do with him. And she doesn’t know what to do with Chris.
There’s no power because he turned it off.
He turned it off to give Emma something to worry about.
He gave her something to worry about because he was irritated by her complacency.
He was irritated by her complacency because he found his envelope of antibiotics, opened, and hidden.
And now he is stuck in the dark.
If he can get some light, he can see about taking one of the doors off.
There are a couple of torches on one of the shelves at the back of the garage. Stored without batteries in case of leakage.
But the box of batteries is in the lounge beside his mother’s keyboard.
The wind-up torch is on the windowsill in the kitchen.
The lantern torch is in the van, which is parked on a flooded street a couple of miles away.
His phone is upstairs, charging. With his toolbox.
The door hinges are on the outside, inaccessible.
The same multi-point locking system he chose to keep people out is going to keep him in.
Here he is, like Jonah. Swallowed up. Surrounded by water.
He waits, shivering. Wet clothes pasted to his skin. Eventually, the darkness thins to expose the ribs of roof battens, and tools, hanging from the walls like bones: strimmer, spade, shovel, axe. Obstacles reveal themselves: his mother’s suitcase, hay bales, the builders’ bag of wood, his wheelbarrow and lawn mower. He identifies the shelves at the back of the garage where he has been storing supplies. The hessian bags and the sand – he should make himself useful. But alongside the sugar, vanilla extract, salt and vinegar there’s a bottle of vodka and one of brandy. Chris doesn’t like spirits. He rarely drinks; it only leads to maudlinism. Still, he picks up the vodka, unscrews its top and takes a sip. The bitter liquid burns his nose and throat and leaves his mouth dry.
He fitted his own kitchen. He could have easily taken care of the rabbit. Two lessons he learned from his father: it’s not hard to make something and it’s not hard to kill something. He takes another sip and sits on a hay bale, holding the bottle.
Chris spent the early part of his childhood on a farm. It wasn’t theirs; they lived in a tied cottage which was, in fact, a 1950s semi with no central heating and single glazed windows. Still, his mother insisted on calling it a cottage, and since she didn’t insist on much, everyone joined in.
In his memory, it is always either the height of summer or the depths of winter on the farm. During the summer the air was thick with the warm, musky stench of manure and animal bedding, and he and Ruth played outside on a seesaw his father constructed by securing half an old tyre to a plank of wood. Fly papers hung from the kitchen ceiling, red canisters dangling from the sticky, poison-coated streamers like exploded fireworks. Trapped flies pedalled their legs and wagged their wings. Once, Chris stuck the tip of a used paper to Ruth’s hair, and pretended it was an accident. In winter, it was freezing. His mother fixed curtains to the backs of doors and procured a series of draught-excluding animals: a snake, a sausage dog and a crocodile. ‘Put a hat on,’ she’d say in response to complaints about the cold. ‘Put a scarf on.’ ‘Put your gloves on.’ And finally, ‘Put a blanket on.’ And Chris and Ruth would stagger around, wrapped in coarse golden blankets like a pair of sausage rolls. In the mornings, ice formed on the insides of bedroom windows. In the evenings, baths had to be taken quickly: Ruth, his mother, then Chris and, finally, his father. If they were quick, the water was still just about warm when it was his father’s turn to sit in the family gravy. No one retreated to their room until it was time to go to sleep because it was bitter upstairs. Each bed had a pile of extra blankets beside it and Chris and Ruth wore zippered sleepsuits with plastic-coated feet over their pyjamas.
His father arose at five o’clock every day to bring the cows in. He fetched them from the field in the summer and from the shed in the winter and then let them into the collecting yard, watching as they filtered into the milking parlour. Each cow’s tail was wrapped in a different colour tape, indicating how much she should eat. The data was fed into a primitive computer system that controlled the length of time a trap door above each stall would open, allowing food to drop from the loft above and down a little chute into the trough. After the milking was completed his father washed out the pipes and took the cows back to the field. Then he hosed down the parlour and collecting yard. All before breakfast.
It was an Ayrshire herd, white and brown; you hardly see them nowadays. Each cow was named and numbered. Chris’s favourite was 151, Silver Rose. He liked Dream, too. She was old and placid, and sometimes, if he’d been to the field to help, his father would lift him on to Dream’s back and let him ride her to the yard.
Chris sought his father out after school. If he was in a good mood, Chris accompanied him to the milking parlour. There, Chris scampered up the wooden stairs to the loft and shovelled rolled barley into the hoppers, ready to drop down to the cows during milking. It was warm and dusty, and the air smelled slightly sweet, like flour. In the cubicle shed he’d watch the cows licking molasses from the five-gallon barrel which had a roller ball in it, like a deodorant. When the babies were born, they stayed in a pen with their mother for a day or two, after which they were removed and sent down to the yard, where they were reared with the other calves. If a calf wasn’t doing well, his father would fetch a bucket of milk and tell Chris to cup his hand and place his fingers in its mouth; carefully, though – the calves had sharp front teeth. The calf would suck on Chris’s fingers and, as it sucked, he would lower his hand into the bucket until it was sucking up the milk, too. Calf tongues were rough and long; scratchy, like a warm piece of sandpaper.
Chris knew where calves came from. For a while he imagined human babies arrived via different means. Prayer, perhaps. But, eventually, it dawned on him and, for a week or two, he went about in a state of disbelief, mortified at the thought of his mother on all fours, his father sniffing her backside and then climbing onto her as she stared straight ahead, trying not to mind.
His mother will surely miss him and come looking. And he will be blamed for his unavoidable absence. ‘I thought you might have called while I was out,’ she often says as a pretext for phoning. And the moment he says he didn’t, he is guilty of neglect.
He remembers going through a growth spurt in infant school, leading his classmates to refer to his trousers as half-masters.
‘Just wait ’til spring,’ his mother said. ‘I’ll get you new ones, then.’
As he waited, the fabric bobbled and the threads covering his knees slowly parted, until, finally, it was spring and one Friday, after school, his mother took the trousers away. The following Monday morning she produced a pair of shorts.
‘Nearly summer now,’ she said.
Chris stepped into the shorts. They felt soft and worn around the waist, familiar in fact, and he realised he’d been had.
‘These are just my trousers, only shorter,’ he complained, twisting to view the bobbled fabric covering his backside.
‘I never said they weren’t your trousers.’
‘I’m not wearing them.’
‘It’s them, or your underpants.’
Chris fumbled with the waistband.
‘Oh, you can’t do that,’ his mother said. ‘Mr Parry will be very angry if you go to school in your underpants. So will Miss Walling. And I’ll get into trouble, too.’
He made it as far as the front door in his underpants before turning back to fetch his dismembered trousers. It was the thought of her being in trouble that made him surrender. She never required obedience – she was always petitioning on behalf of someone else, someone in authority who would be angry; it was better all round if he just did as he was told.
Chris takes another sip from the bottle. His parents stopped drinking after a brief flirtation with Methodism when he was a boy. But food was to be embraced. It was compulsory to clear your plate. Hot meals were served at midday, when his father was at his hungriest. To start school was to miss out, though there were consolations: ice-cream-scoop mashed potatoes and the option of chips and beans with everything. After school, his mother would place a stack of bread and butter on the table alongside a jar of jam, a block of cheddar, and a homemade cake or plate of scones. At the weekends and in the school holidays, Chris was home at midday and present for proper dinner: shepherd’s pie, pasties, bubble and squeak or, when they’d bought a share in a pig, thick juicy sausages, the butcher’s secret recipe. But sometimes there was liver, and then each of the familiar sounds of his father’s midday return resonated like a tolling bell: the opening of the back porch door, the removal of each welly – thunk, thunk; the unfastening of his boiler suit – pop, pop, pop; the sound of the taps as he washed his big red hands in the little sink; and Chris traipsed to the table, where his plate awaited him like a punishment. He remembers a Saturday when, having eaten most of the mashed potatoes, his liver loomed like a stack of slugs.
His father liked to say: Every moving thing that liveth shall be meat for you; even as the green herb have I given you all things. In his mind, the verse equated to: Everything upon your plate shall be eaten by you.
In later years, Chris would respond with Let not him that eateth despise him that eateth not. But, as a boy, he was unaware of the suppleness of scripture.
‘Eat up. It’ll put hairs on your chest.’
‘I don’t want hairs on my chest.’
His father stabbed a lump of liver and held it near Chris’s involuntarily pursed lips. Gravy dribbled off the end of the suspended meat. There was something jellyish about it. Chris imagined it might spring and squish between his teeth like the inner tube of a bicycle.
‘We can’t afford to waste food,’ his father said, plate clean, as always. Ruth had finished hers, too. ‘When I said grace, we thanked God for our dinner.’
Chris had not thanked God for anything. Certainly not liver, and he was annoyed that his thanks, which had not been proffered, had been stolen and offered up anyway.
‘Fine. Fine. You sit there until you’ve eaten it.’
He couldn’t. The more he looked at it, the worse it got. What would happen if he absolutely refused? Surely his mother would let him off when his father returned to work, he thought, not yet wary enough of her sporadic strictness, her tendency to arbitrarily act as his father’s enforcer.
Chris sat at the table until eight o’clock, when it was time for bed. The gravy had separated. The liver looked like slices of suede.
Breakfast: liver.
‘Do it for me,’ his mother said. ‘You don’t want me to get into trouble with your dad, do you?’
Chris took a bite out of the cold meat. It squeaked between his molars. He fetched a large glass of water and swallowed each livery slug whole, until his insides were swollen and quivering.
‘I got Chris to eat his dinner,’ he heard her whisper to his father, afterwards.
In due course, he realised they were rivals in a competition to see who could win his father’s approval. Chris, Ruth, his mother – they all vied for the honour, until he dropped out, then Ruth, and there was only his mother left.
Their time on the farm was mostly happy. Largely, Chris thinks, vodka bottle pressed to his lips, because his father was so busy. When you’re busy, God fits into the gaps: in the moments of a field-observed sunrise, during a difficult calving, in the muffled silence of a snowy winter morning. Never home until six or seven o’clock most evenings, and as late as ten o’clock in the summer during haymaking, his father was utterly exhausted, spilling straight into sleep the moment he lay down. Outside all day, his father wore the weather; he bathed in it and was battered by it, forever soaking or sunburned, shivering or sweating. Life was an exercise in pitting and partaking: Frank Abram versus nature and Frank Abram nurses nature. And all the while his father was musing and meditating, pondering his purpose. But ask now the beasts, and they shall teach thee; and the fowls of the air, and they shall tell thee: Or speak to the earth, and it shall teach thee: and the fishes of the sea shall declare unto thee. Wasn’t that what Erasmus had wanted – the farm labourer singing snatches of scripture at his plough? Or in his father’s case, the herdsman humming hymns in the cubicle shed.
Back then, his father’s inspirations were largely innocuous. The Lord spoke common sense, told him to seek after good things, grow vegetables, share his faith with others, and swap congregations when he fell out with people over interpretations of this or that scripture. Everything changed when Chris was ten. The Ayrshire herd’s milk yield was low. A Friesian herd, then, his father suggested. But sheep were the way forward; less labour-intensive for most of the year, and Mr Atherton-Jones, who owned the farm, had a son who had just finished at Myerscough College and was ready to take charge of a flock, so there was no longer any need for a herdsman or stockman.
After Chris’s family packed up and moved to town, after the cattle, and then the sheep, were sold, and after attempts at diversification failed, the farm was split into lots and auctioned off. Now, their old house is a holiday let. The area is advertised as well situated for fishing, birdwatching and horse riding, and within easy reach of Liverpool, Manchester and the Lake District. On occasions when Chris has had jobs out towards Parbold, he has driven into the old yard and turned the van around, pretending to be lost. The trees and the brambles that ran across the back of his childhood garden have been cut down. Manicured and transitory, it’s a place of recreation, not work. Late on a Sunday afternoon a couple of years ago, he drove Emma and his parents out there. Emma stood in the yard, admiring everything, as if it had been placed there expressly for her pleasure.
‘It’s like a painting,’ she said as the light changed.
‘No, it’s like a sunset,’ his father replied.
Life was different at Victory Avenue. Chris’s was the single bedroom at the front of the house, its window right above the door. There were times when he would spy his father, newly returned from work at the sweet factory, lingering in the front yard, savouring his last moments outdoors when, arms extended like branches to feel the rain or leaning into the wind like the figurehead on a boat, he briefly resembled the old, bigger version of Frank Abram, subject to and subject of nature.
Milk arrived in a glass bottle each morning, the supermarket sausages tasted wrong, and the churches nearby seemed less tolerant of his father’s inspirations. There was spare time after work and at the weekends. Time for his father to attend an Alpha course and time for the Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Mormons and the local curate to pop round for discussions which tended to become heated. His father couldn’t do religion like other people – they seemed able to turn their attention to goodness. But his father, inclined to periodic despondency and plagued by existential crises, couldn’t divert his thoughts to more pleasant pastures and remained haunted by the fear that whatever path he was presently following might not, after all, be the right one.
The rest of Chris’s childhood was dominated by his parents’ epic spiritual journey, his father in the driver’s seat, his mother beside him, and Chris and Ruth in the back, belted in and unable to get out. The journey was long, boring and cramped. There were no rest breaks. Heaven was the destination, but without a fixed route there were U-turns and diversions and sometimes the same roads were traversed year after year. There was no point in asking, ‘Are we nearly there yet?’ They were always nearly there.
His father never locked the car. What was the point of believing in God if he couldn’t trust Him to look after it?
But, Chris said, wasn’t the open car an invitation to thieves, and didn’t it therefore contravene Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God?
He was big enough, by then, to defend himself. Which he did.
It was years before Chris could say, ‘I don’t believe.’ He knew when he finally disappointed his parents it wouldn’t be something that happened just the once; he’d have to stick with it. Such a small thing, he thinks now, years later, with almost-grown sons of his own. Yet, having spent his childhood listening to the way his father talked about people who didn’t feel as he did: weak, worldly, sinful – it seemed momentous. So much of what his parents said and did had been about drawing a circle: ‘We are this’ and ‘We are that’. Stepping outside the circle, Chris forfeited we and became them. ‘We still love you,’ his mother said once, voice quavering, as if she hoped to convince herself as much as Chris. But it was a provisional, last-resort kind of love. Their stories, songs and prayers condemned him. They had planted wheat and he had developed into a tare. What happens when you grow up to be the baddie you were warned about? Imagine how it feels to be the biggest disappointment of someone’s life. Chris tried to explain it, once.
‘I won’t forsake my morality to make you feel better,’ his father replied. ‘Love the sinner, hate the sin.’
‘Love your father, hate his God.’
‘That is a ridiculous comparison.’
Oh, he is sorry for himself, now. Chris unscrews the lid and takes another drink, a longer one this time, his throat primed for the burn.
His father’s inspirations increased. The end was approaching. Frank contacted friends to warn them. If their dismissals were lukewarm or polite, there was a chance they may be persuaded; if vociferous, they had felt threatened by the power of his words.
The year before Dylan was born, his father believed the tribulation would begin. He would sell the house and move to a caravan. A great and terrible day was coming – great for Frank and Janet, and terrible for almost everyone else. There were still several years left on the mortgage but, for a couple who lived frugally, the balance was a lot of money, even after the purchase of the caravan. And, having spent years pondering the meaning of sell all thou hast and distribute it unto the poor, his father set about giving his money away.
The world did not end, and his mother reinterpreted his father’s pronouncements, making them less absolute and more plausible. What he had really meant was this, or that. It was her special skill to apply mastic to memories, attacking them with a little trowel, pointing and smoothing edges, filling in gaps and creating a watertight seal, all the while revealing the true shape of things as she saw them. As she wished them.
When Dylan and James were toddlers, the sweet factory closed, and production moved to Slovakia. So his father picked leeks and sprayed crops out at Rainford. He packed mushrooms in Ormskirk. Cut, harvested and planted salads in glasshouses in Preston. Worked until he was stiff and slow, and no one would have him.
‘I’m fine,’ his mother said when Chris asked about finances, after his father’s death.
‘Is there anything left?’
‘It’s not something you need to worry about.’
‘I can’t believe he— It was your money, too.’
‘Your father felt it was a test.’
‘Right. And did you pass?’
She didn’t know or wouldn’t say. All the lines of thought that should have made it from her brain to her mouth were diverted. The routes of any critical ideas and impressions were closed off, a series of dead ends, branching out like sidings.
Chris shuffles back on the bale and leans against the concrete wall. Rain thumps the roof and the wind whips down the passageway between the garage and boundary fence. The alcohol is warming him from the inside out. His own private radiator.
He thinks of his mother’s ridiculous heater. Of her annoying habit of having it on before bed and her reluctance to allow ventilation. Of the quiet stubbornness that never progresses to outright disagreement yet leads to her closing the skylight as soon as his back is turned. He thinks of the letter from the hospital. Of her reported headaches and dizziness. And the meander of his thoughts sends him back to a spot where he can see them, looping, connected.
The heater; the headaches.
His boys, sleeping across the hall.
The alcohol works like loppers, blunting his emotions: chop, chop; it cuts the top off his anxiety, but when he gets out, he’ll go straight upstairs, fetch the heater and bring it here. The temperature is due to drop in the coming weeks. He can switch the boiler back on, if necessary.
Connection made, plan devised, Chris lifts the bottle to his lips again and, staring through the shadows at the locked doors, waits. Emma will surely appear before long. It’s hard to offend her. On their wedding day, his mother asked her to step to one side so she could have a ‘family only’ photo. Emma laughed and complied. She finds it amusing that his mother has that photo up in the caravan: a wedding with no bride.
But Emma shoved him on the patio.
Refused to give up the rabbit.
Locked him in the garage.
He reruns the moments before he was locked in.
Emma’s face as she hit the ground.
Her scrambling legs as she tried to get away.
Her bleeding hands wrapped tight around a creature she doesn’t even like.
On one level, he is appalled. He has behaved badly. He sees it. But he is pursuing the common good. Emma must understand that. She will, he decides. Soon the door will open and reveal her, standing in the light like an angel, come to impart a message of deliverance.
He screws the lid on the bottle and places it on the floor beside him. What if the factors of one’s life, when multiplied, do not combine to make a whole number, but rather a series of fractions with no common denominator? What if the father who demanded perfection is the father who fashioned a bow and arrow out of a sycamore branch for your seventh birthday? If the father who made everyone kneel while he delivered imploring prayers is the father who patiently taught you to build a fire, tie a knot and jump-start a car. If the father to whom you were a perpetual disappointment is the father who returned at eight o’clock each morning for his breakfast break, carrying a four-pint churn of milk taken straight from the top of the refrigerated bulk tank because you liked the cream. In the days of Noah, there were giants in the land. It was easy to believe in giants when Frank Abram was your father; though, in the end, his father had been a big man grown small, gradually rubbed down, like a bar of soap.
How will his own boys remember him? Chris hasn’t given it much consideration. Beginning to feel drowsy, he closes his eyes. He has tried to be a good parent. What’s his number-one tip for fatherhood? Don’t take parenting advice from a God who drowned his own children.
Ruth holds the phone to one ear, her hand over the other, as Elijah pursues his older brothers with a fishing rod, a golden star dangling from its tip. The fishing rod was Rob’s idea. A terrible one, given Elijah’s talent for converting everyday objects into weapons. The boys are dressed to please Ruth’s mother in costumes originally bought for the Sunday School nativity: polyester robes festooned with plastic ‘jewels’, each sweaty head topped by a magnificent crown.
‘I can’t quite – shush! Boys! That’s enough! Sorry, Emma. I might as well be talking to myself … and now I sound like my mother. Is she all right?’
Since the builders left last month, the boys have made it their mission to expose flaws in the design of the open-plan living space. Yesterday, they discovered the Velcro seams in the newly visible back of the leather sofa and attempted to climb inside. This afternoon, the kitchen island is a speedway. Amos, the oldest and usually most sensible of her boys – it doesn’t necessarily follow that he be both; Ruth remembers her nephew Dylan as a child – skids around the top end of the island, uncharacteristically giddy. Thank goodness Rob chose worktops with rounded edges.
‘Hang on, let me just …’ Ruth steps into the washroom, now the only private downstairs space, and locks the door. ‘There! I can hear you now.’
The day started well enough. Ruth’s alarm went off at six o’clock and she rolled straight out of bed. As soon as her feet landed on the carpet, she touched the base of the bedside light with her index finger and retrieved the sports bra, T-shirt and leggings from the floor beside the bed. Ignoring her reflection in the mirrored wardrobes, she dressed quickly. There was no need to worry about waking Rob. More often than not, he occupies the spare room, where he remains at the boys’ beck and call like a night receptionist. Their preference for his ministrations is such that when they shuffle into her room with their stomach aches and nightmares and ambiance-related complaints, alongside any irritation or exhaustion, she also experiences a spike of pleasure at having been chosen.
Ruth slipped into the en suite where she peed, cleaned her teeth and fastened her hair in a clip. Then she tiptoed down the stairs, filled her water bottle and unlocked the front door.
It was raining again. She didn’t bother with a coat; shivering in the car is part of her routine, like taking an ice bath, and she’s always hot on the way home anyway. She was indicating, ready to pull out of the drive, when she remembered the bloody elf. Having reported back to Santa overnight, it needed to reappear somewhere so it could continue spying on the boys. It was the last day, too, which meant she was supposed to do something fancy: leave glitter footprints, presents, or a letter promising its return next year. She dashed back into the house and retrieved the thing. Where to put it? She’d looked up easy ideas online when she gave in and agreed to the whole performance; they included making clothes for it, staging various culinary ‘accidents’ – something she couldn’t countenance in the new kitchen – and fashioning amusing props, such as a set of ‘dumb-bells’ made from drinking straws and marshmallows. Oh, there was nothing easy about it, which was why Rob, she later realised, had refused to have any part in it. Guilt at working late rendered her helpless in the face of the boys’ pleas, and she clicked Buy It Now to a chorus of cheers.
Ruth opened the fridge, hoping for some inspiration. The bottle of wine she hadn’t quite finished the previous evening sat in the door beside an unopened four-pint carton of milk. She grabbed the elf and wrapped it in a tea towel, leaving only its face showing, as if nestled in a sleeping bag. Then she stuffed it between the wine and the milk and shut it in. Good. She does not like the idea of a magical person spying on her children. It reminds her of the way God was employed during her childhood: a voyeuristic, sneaky fellow, intent on catching people out. But Rob, unaffected by the faff, thinks it’s all harmless fun, and the boys seem to enjoy it – they certainly aren’t cowed; their behaviour hasn’t exactly improved during the lead-up to Christmas.
Ruth drove to town, reversed into ‘her’ spot in the multi-storey car park, and hurried down the concrete staircase, skipping over the desiccated splat of vomit on the first-floor landing. Throughout December, the gym has remained a Christmas-free environment. Not a decoration in sight, which pleases Ruth. It’s supposed to be the most wonderful time of the year but her wonderful time has been hijacked by ephemera: finding a suitable Secret Santa gift for the new paralegal, wondering whether it would be possible to work from home on Christmas jumper day (it wasn’t), trying to decide if avoiding the work Christmas party would affect her status as a ‘team player’ (it would), remembering the stupid elf, and listening to Rob’s stay-at-home-parent complaints: the class Christmas parties for which he’d been required to send in fruit platters and antipasti (what was wrong with sausage rolls, and cheese and pineapple on sticks?), his search for matching pyjamas, and the rector’s request for homemade hats at the Sunday School Christmas parade – as if the boys, excitement peaking, would sit and make hats with their daddy.
The treadmill in front of the television was free. The BBC news played, volume muted, and Ruth began her usual game of looking for mistakes in the subtitles, trying to work out what the interviewees had really said, before the corrections appeared. She likes it when there are lots of mistakes; it feels as if there is someone hiding in the screen, gently pulling her leg. When there’s an especially fitting error, Ruth decelerates and types the incorrect word(s), and subsequent clarifications, into her phone: fierce stories (fear stories), migrate grandfather (my great-grandfather), double mistake to me (double mastectomy), wrecks it (Brexit).
Ruth loves the morning quiet. Initially, she worried about looking silly while exercising, but no one pays any attention to her. She has wondered whether Emma might also enjoy it. It’s hard to know what to buy for Emma, who sends such thoughtful presents. Last year she made gloves for the boys and, in an amusing nod to knuckle tattoos, embroidered the fingers with ‘Time Lord’, ‘Stay Cool’ and ‘Born Wild’ respectively. Emma probably wouldn’t want to drive into town each morning, though. And there’d be no point in her walking; it’s nearly three miles from Moss Lane to the gym – Ruth checked. Unless she cycled, like James with his papers. But Ruth isn’t sure whether Emma’s old bike is still in use, and she doesn’t like to ask in case Chris thinks she is being nosy about their finances, which, she suspects, are dire. The gym is the cheapest in town. The monthly fee wouldn’t cover two coffee-shop lattes. But how do you present someone with a gym membership without implying they are fat? Worried about getting it wrong, Ruth has chickened out and bought vouchers for everyone, again.
Having jogged for thirty minutes, she stepped off the treadmill. As she left, she noticed a couple of mums from the boys’ school arriving for a spin class, sporting co-ordinated leisure wear and carefully applied make-up. Nice women who had invited her for coffee one Saturday morning, though she didn’t pass muster, or perhaps she missed the cue for what should happen next, and now, when she sees them, she gives a little wave from across the room, and they wave back, smiling, but distant, as if from the opposite bank of a river.
When she arrived home, Ruth discovered a dog walker had left a bag of poo hanging from the magnolia tree beside the gatepost, like an awful Christmas decoration. Carrying the poo, she stepped through the front door to the sound of Rob singing a silly version of ‘We Three Kings’, which the boys would almost certainly repeat later, in front of her mother. The Famous Five book Rob had been reading to the boys at bedtimes lay open-winged on the hall rug. She stepped over it and into the newly knocked-through living space, where she stumbled into an abandoned bowl of cereal. Just before it tipped, she saw the elf sitting in the milk, arms wide across the bowl’s rim as if relaxing in a hot tub.
Having put the poo in the outside bin and sent the boys to tidy their rooms, in case Father Christmas was offended by the mess, Ruth set about cleaning the floor while Rob sat at the island, holding the Christmas crackers like telescopes, trying to see if one of them contained a fortune-telling fish.
‘Remember them? They were my favourite.’
Ruth shook her head. As if her peppery, red-faced father would have allowed fortune telling during Christmas dinner. Crouched on the floor with a cloth, she started telling Rob about the new boy who’d been at Amos’s Kumon class, the previous Saturday morning.
‘Imagine moving to a foreign country at eight years old, bless him. Everything would be strange. Even little things, like going to the supermarket.’
‘I’m sure they’ve got food in …’
‘Pakistan. Yes, I know, but he might not recognise things. I mean brands. Like us in the Polish aisle, except the whole shop will be different.’
‘They’ve got normal stuff in the Polish aisle. They’ve got juice. I’ve bought it, before.’
‘But there’s loads of unfamiliar stuff, too. I wouldn’t know what to do with half of it.’
‘I would.’
‘Anyway, I think it must be hard for him, for Babar—’
‘For who?’
‘Babar.’
‘Sounds like a sheep. Baaaaa-baaaaa – ha-ha!’
Ruth had intended to conclude her anecdote with the news that while chatting to Babar’s mother, she’d discovered he was a Liverpool fan, meaning he and Amos had something in common. Instead, she sighed. ‘I don’t know why you have to—’
‘It was a joke.’
‘I was trying to say something, and you interrupted me to take the mickey.’
‘No, I was making a joke.’
‘It wasn’t funny.’
‘Oh, stop telling me off.’
‘I’m not.’ Ruth got to her feet. ‘I’m trying to talk to you and … I don’t like it when you interrupt me with stupid, flippant … It’s like being heckled.’
‘It was a joke.’
Ruth thought of Elijah’s maternity leave – the tiredest time of her life, when nocturnal cluster feeds left her with blurred vision and jelly legs. Given the boys’ recent sleep patterns, Rob must be similarly knackered, yet each morning he managed to pour himself into jolly dad mould, all set for japes and hilarity. She suddenly felt petty for complaining, though she couldn’t resist a further attempt at mitigation.
‘I was just trying to tell you something about Amos and his new friend and—’
‘I’m allowed to make jokes.’
‘When I talk, it sometimes seems, instead of listening, you’re thinking of silly things to say. You know I won’t find them funny, but you do it, anyway. And if I ignore what you’ve said, or I get annoyed at being interrupted, you don’t like it. What do you want me to do?’
‘Laugh,’ he said. ‘You’re not at work now. No one’s going to complain to HR if you enjoy a joke.’
Ruth turned and squeezed the milk-soaked dishcloth into the sink. Shoulders hunched, feelings hurt, she felt like a clone of her mother. If only someone else had given birth to her. Someone fulsome and fearless. Someone with female friends and snappy repartee. Ruth’s preparations for adult life had centred on achieving financial independence and avoiding the kind of man who might consider it his right to make unilateral decisions. But there are other traps. Other ways of partitioning families.
She busied herself with rinsing the cloth before trying again.
‘Interrupting me, to say something you know I won’t find funny – and you know because you’ve known me for more than a decade – feels rude.’
‘Telling me off when I make a joke, like I’m a child – what’s that?’
Afraid there was something deeply unpleasant under the surface words of their conversation, Ruth left it. They were tired. It was Christmas Eve. There was the party to look forward to.
And now she leans against the washing machine, listening as Emma apologetically cancels the party.
The boys are all dressed up with nowhere to go. There will be tears; they’ve been looking forward to haranguing their big cousins. Ruth is disappointed, too. She enjoys Emma’s peculiar party: the eclectic food, the nostalgic music and the way the boys disappear upstairs to play games with Dylan and James, eventually reappearing in a state of ecstatic exhaustion. Last year they fell asleep in the car on the way home, heads back, mouths slack and wide, like three little chimneys puffing chocolate-scented smoke.
‘Let’s go, anyway,’ Rob says, unperturbed by the blocked bridge and the power cut. ‘What do you think, guys? Shall we go to Uncle Chris and Aunty Emma’s house? Shall we surprise them?’
The boys cheer.
‘Don’t you think it would be a bit rude—’
‘Not if we come bearing gifts. We’ll stop on the way and buy a couple of rotisserie chickens.’
‘Oh, not on Christmas Eve, Rob. It’ll be—’
‘Come on, they’ve got no power. We can’t leave them to starve.’
‘I’m sure Emma—’
‘We can’t go without provisions.’
‘Like the Famous Five, visiting Kirrin Island!’ Amos says.
‘Exactly.’ Rob grins. ‘Come on,’ he says, nudging Ruth as they pile out of the house. ‘It’ll be fun.’
There are no baskets, so Ruth squeezes back through the supermarket doors in search of a trolley. At least it has finally stopped raining.
She can barely move in the shop. But the boys, in their robes and crowns, whip between people, singing.
‘One in a taxi!’
‘One in a car!’
‘One on a scooter, blowing his hoo-ooter …!’
Having snagged the chickens, Rob pushes through the mêlée, ahead of Ruth, calling, ‘Would Emma like a cheeseboard? Do Chris and the boys eat salmon now he’s gone all environmental?’
‘Well,’ Ruth replies, not certain whether she’d describe Chris in those terms. Incensed by problems he did not cause and cannot fix, Chris reminds her of their father who, right up until his death, remained attached to a notion most people shake off when they reach adulthood: any important happenings were somehow related to him – the weather, politics, Elijah’s inability to sit still. If you believe in an authoritarian God, proffering punishments and rewards, perhaps you have no choice but to take everything personally. But Chris doesn’t believe, making his behaviour less comprehensible to Ruth.
As usual, she can’t keep up with Elijah and it’s not long before he is out of sight.
‘Amos, Nathan, will you go and find him, please?’
‘We’ll be by the bakery, guys,’ Rob says. ‘Come and meet us once you’ve got him. Keep up, Ruth! We might as well get some bread in.’
‘You said there was bread in the freezer. Do we have to faff about with this now?’
‘Do we have to faff about with this now?’ Rob echoes in a silly falsetto. ‘Come on, it’s Christmas!’
Ruth follows in his wake, wondering whether the whiny, shrill voice is an imitation of her own, or an intimation of how he feels, under his coat of jokes.
She pays while Rob gets a head start to the car with the boys. She returns the trolley and removes the canvas shopping bags, slinging one over each shoulder.
As she approaches the car, Rob reverses out of the parking space. When she is within reaching distance of the passenger door, he edges the car forward. She takes a few steps, goes for the door again, and Rob nudges the accelerator. She can see the boys, unbuckling themselves, scrabbling to enjoy the view. Ruth won’t run; she only runs at the gym, where no one is watching. She approaches the car again, attempting to maintain some dignity by not hurrying. Each time she steps up and tries to open the door, Rob moves away. And as she follows yonder car, three Wise Men watch though the back window, their faces contorted with laughter.
The last thing Ruth wanted was a life spent second-guessing a flinty, complicated husband. Rob is neither of those things. He is soft-hearted and straightforward. And he used to be funny. How would he reply, if she said that to him? ‘You used to be fun,’ perhaps.
In the summer, they visited the Lake District. On their way up to Easedale Tarn, the boys stopped and removed their shoes and socks so they could explore the freezing pool beneath a waterfall. Ruth watched from the water’s edge, enjoying their delight, until she heard Rob greeting someone. She turned to see one of her work colleagues, Andy, and his wife, Liz; child-free and bronzed, both dwarfed by enormous backpacks.
‘Ho! You’re just in time. Ruth’s about to take all her clothes off and jump in the pool with the boys.’
‘I am not.’
‘Oh, she is! We’re in for a treat!’
Andy and Liz laughed politely, and Ruth turned to keep an eye on the boys, thereby excusing herself from further conversation.
‘I can’t believe you,’ she said as the couple disappeared up the track.
‘What?’
‘Oh, ha-ha, look at Ruth. She’s out of shape, isn’t she? Wouldn’t it be funny if we all saw her naked?’
‘I didn’t say that.’
‘Oh, you did. And you laughed. You wouldn’t have laughed if the idea of me, naked, in front of them, wasn’t funny.’
‘It was a joke!’
‘A joke is when the other person laughs.’
‘I was just being friendly. It’s not my fault if you can’t—’
‘I am not your straight man.’
‘It was a harmless—’
‘You belittled me in front of them.’
There had been other jokes.
‘Look at you two, lounging around, gossiping!’ Rob said when Emma popped in to see the new kitchen. ‘Where’s the Prosecco, heh? Where are you hiding it?’
Ruth tried to ignore him. The ground floor of the house was now three times the size of Chris and Emma’s, and she felt awkward about showing it off. They resumed their conversation, but Rob persisted.
‘This is the life, eh? Ladies of leisure.’
‘Why did you say that?’ Ruth asked, later, when Emma had left.
‘It was a joke,’ he replied flatly. ‘It was funny because I didn’t mean it.’
‘I work extremely hard.’
‘So do I,’ he replied. ‘Who project-managed the extension? Who made hundreds of cups of tea and coffee? Who ensured you and the boys weren’t inconvenienced while we didn’t have a kitchen?’
The canvas bags slide off Ruth’s shoulders and she tugs them back into place. This is a joke, she tells herself; it’s funny because Rob doesn’t mean it. But it doesn’t feel like a joke; it feels like something else entirely.
She won’t move again. She waits, feet planted on the tarmac.
A car pulls up behind Rob and, unable to remain stopped, he must follow the loop of the busy car park, forced at regular intervals to brake and let other drivers out of their spaces. By the time he returns, the boys are back in their seats, and no one is laughing.
They head east, out of town, before turning off on to a narrow road that cuts through fields and past occasional clusters of houses. Before long, the houses peter out and the dog-leg road is flanked by brimming ditches and sludgy fields.
At the approach to a half-barrier level crossing, the road is momentarily divided in two and then it narrows again, this time to a single track with intermittent passing places, its surface smeared by soggy clods of soil where tractors have been in and out of the fields.
Eventually, they reach Chris and Emma’s house. Rob continues past it, nosing the car up to the bridge so the boys can examine the barriers.
The day is waning, though it’s barely three thirty. It won’t be long before the dark creeps across the fields and settles in the ditch that runs opposite Chris and Emma’s house. On the other side of the bridge, Ruth notes the lazy glow of a newly awakened streetlight. In the distance, another streetlight stirs, sluggish and pale.
‘Maybe the power’s back on,’ she says, pointing.
‘I’m pretty sure streetlights can come on when domestic power’s off. Something to do with the way power leaves substations.’
‘The bungalows down past the allotments have power, don’t they? Stand here. Look. Can you see Christmas lights in the distance?’
‘I think power’s sometimes split across two or three circuits before it’s delivered to homes. If that’s true, and the fault’s in one circuit, you could have a street where there’s some on and some off.’
Rob takes one of the shopping bags from Ruth and passes it to Elijah; it’s a good idea to give him a task, the busier the better, but he struggles with it, adopting a slow shuffle, Rob’s fishing rod dangling from his other hand, the star waving to and fro, catching anyone who comes close. In the end, Ruth takes the bag back, leaving Elijah to wave his star from side to side as Rob sings, ‘Bearing chickens we traverse afar. Field and fountain, ditch and mountain, following yonder star. O-o, star of wonder, star of night, sit on a pack of dynamite!’
‘Why don’t you practise your nativity words?’ Ruth suggests, thinking to calm the boys as they reach the drive.
Amos delivers his line in a monotone, as if each word has been partitioned from its neighbour and bears no relation to the next.
‘And. The. Star. They. Had. Seen. When. It. Rose. Went. Ahead. Of. Them. Until. It. Stopped. Over. The. Place. Where. The. Child. Was.’
Nathan follows with: ‘When they saw the star, they were overjoyed.’
‘They bowed down and worshipped him,’ Elijah concludes, waving the star madly.
The boys have learned the modern words. As a result, the whole story sounds off to Ruth. Her mother will notice, too, and hanker after the old words: ‘When they saw the star, they rejoiced with exceeding great joy.’
Oh, her mother won’t say anything, but she’ll wince or raise an eyebrow and Ruth, attuned to the nuances of her mood, will feel compelled to make a compensatory gesture. If her father were still around, he would comment – What a shame the Lord’s original words had been altered! And then Emma, feeling obliged to intercede, might gently agree that the King James translation sounded more poetic. She might mention the original, fourth-century manuscript of the Book of Matthew, saying she believed it was in Greek. Then Chris would likely make a snarky comment, causing Rob to laugh because, no matter how many times Ruth tells him otherwise, he can’t shake the idea that disagreements about religion are inconsequential.
‘It’s so quiet,’ Rob says.
Ruth turns. There is something spooky about the inert fields in the dimming light. Not a car in sight; a drained, after-rain hush stilling the air.
‘Well, it’s access only, isn’t it?’ she says. ‘Anyone nipping across from Holmeswood or Rufford will need to take the main roads.’
And then the quiet is broken as someone elbows Elijah: not Amos, and not Nathan, someone else. The invisible man, Rob suggests. But Elijah won’t be placated. The culprit must be told off and no one will admit responsibility.
‘Shall we get some of the silliness out of them before we go in? How about we race up to the road sign, guys? See the white circle with the black line through it? Who can run that far? Tuck your robes into your trousers.’
The road is damp and muddy, dappled by rain-filled potholes.
‘Oh, I’m not sure that’s a—’
Too late, the boys are engaged, rolling their robes and aligning their toes with an imaginary start line.
‘Elijah, give the star to Mummy.’
Ruth takes the fishing rod. ‘Try not to get too wet,’ she says ineffectually.
‘Ready? Hold on to your hats. Go!’ Rob shouts. The boys dash off and he trails after, deliberately slow, huffing and puffing like the Big, Bad Wolf.
Last to reach the sign, the resounding loser, Rob allows himself to be mocked and taunted.
‘Let’s wave to Mummy, guys,’ he says.
They wave, and Ruth feels entirely separate from them, as if they have absolutely nothing to do with her and she has been tricked into a life with this man and the three sons he has brought into being by some strange parthenogenesis.
‘Stand together nicely,’ Rob says, moving along the road a little. ‘Hold hands. Now, smile! Don’t move, Elijah – Father Christmas is watching.’
Ruth watches too as the boys stand like a cut-out paper-chain family and Rob, who does not require a fortifying crack-of-dawn hour to himself, holds up his phone.
When the four of them are nestled together on the sofa as Rob tells a story, or rolling round the garden in a jumble of arms and legs, delighted shrieks of ‘Daddy, Daddy!’ escaping the fray, she sometimes thinks, You should thank me, I picked him for you.
On the way back, Rob gives Amos a run for his money, leaving a sulking Elijah to bring up the rear. Ruth watches as Elijah stops running and scuffs his way to the cusp of the road.
‘Come away from the ditch,’ she calls, foolishly, because once he has her attention, Elijah embarks on a clownish procession along the road’s edge.
From where she is standing, Ruth can’t see the ditch. Repeated resurfacing means the roads have grown higher over time, while soil shrinkage has resulted in the fields dropping. But she knows it is there, lying in wait for her youngest, naughtiest son.
Elijah teeters and wobbles. He windmills his arms, calling, ‘Whoa, whoa, whoa.’
Ruth abandons the canvas bags and fishing rod in the road and, galvanised by the thought of the little body she once breathed for being without air, even for a moment, she runs.
Delighted by her approach, Elijah intensifies his performance, losing his crown in the process. Ruth sees it disappear into the gap between the road and the field and, expecting Elijah to follow, runs at full pelt, newly aware of the molten mess of her insides – the pouches and sockets, the basin of waste in her middle.
When she realises Elijah isn’t going over, it’s too late to stop. Ruth has no choice but to follow through and leaps, arms wide like wings, over the ditch and down into the field. She skids and staggers but remains on her feet. Heart pounding, she bends, hands resting on her thighs as she tries to catch her breath. She hears Rob approaching at a run, feet whacking the tarmac.
‘That was amazing!’ he yells, applauding. ‘Can you jump back up?’
On the wrong side of the ditch, ankle deep in mud, she can’t.
‘I saw a car in a field off Jacksmere Lane the other winter,’ Rob says to the boys, now standing in a line above her. ‘It was a few days before it could be recovered. They had to wait for the ground to harden up before they could use a crane. Do you think we can recover Mummy?’
Ruth rescues the crown, which is floating on the water, and throws it up to Amos, who catches it, one-handed, and passes it to a subdued Elijah. Then she reaches for Rob, hoping their hands will meet across the ditch and, with his support, she’ll be able to leap over and up.
‘Lean a bit further,’ he says.
‘I can’t. If I do, I think I’ll …’
‘Come on, there’s nothing to be afraid of.’
‘Why would you say that?’ Ruth asks, immediately afraid.
She retreats. The water between them is dark, and she has no idea of its depth.
She tries again, edging to the lip of the ditch, extending her hand to Rob so he can steady and raise her as she leaps. Their fingers touch for a moment, but Rob moves his hand away in a pantomime dodge and thumbs his nose at her.
The boys giggle delightedly, and for a moment it seems Ruth, already committed to movement, can propel herself on to the bank without him. But she doesn’t trust herself and hesitates. Rob realises his mistake and reaches again, hand wide, fingers rigid, but it’s too late; she loses her balance and tips into the black water.