Dylan and James carry the heater down the stairs. ‘To me … To you,’ they call, having caught some of their younger cousins’ silliness.
Emma grabs Janet’s dressing gown, a clean pair of her own knickers, and a T-shirt that’s long on her but should be just about right for Ruth. She follows behind the boys and, as they transport the heater along the hall and into the lounge, she passes the dry clothes to Ruth who is shivering on the doorstep, refusing to set foot inside in case she makes a mess.
‘Come in, it doesn’t matter – I’m not bothered.’
‘I’ll just change here,’ Ruth says. ‘It’s not as if there’s anyone about. We’ve turned up without asking and I don’t want to make any extra work for you. If you could get a bin bag, I’ll stick my clothes in it.’
Ruth’s teeth chatter as she speaks; she is drenched from the waist down and from her elbows to her wrists. Emma hurries to the kitchen where flickering tea lights line the windowsill behind the sink, and she can see the outline of the garage against the darkening sky. In the candlelight, the furnishings seem softer and the room holds her in its familiar embrace. The smell of chicken leaks from the canvas bags Rob dumped on the table and she can hear the boys laughing in the lounge. Once Ruth is settled beside Janet’s heater, Emma will let Chris out. Who knows what will happen then? It is as hard for her to envisage his reaction as it is for her to picture the flood on the patio trickling into the house. Her imagination is failing her; she sees herself turning the key in the lock, and then – nothing.
Bin bag in hand, Emma watches Ruth’s outline through the frosted pane of the front door, and once Ruth is wrapped in the purple dressing gown, Emma edges past the door and holds out the bin bag. ‘I’d wash everything for you, but the power …’
‘Oh, don’t worry.’
Ruth lifts her jacket from the pile of clothes and stuffs her hand in a pocket to remove a bundle of soggy envelopes. ‘Your presents,’ she says. ‘Good job gift cards are plastic now.’ She opens a button-up pocket in the chest of the coat and retrieves her phone. ‘Thank God for that.’
‘How exactly did you …?’ Emma asks as Ruth drops sopping clothes into the bag.
‘Rob. He’s such a …’
Emma waits, curious. But Ruth is not forthcoming, so she makes a sympathetic noise and ties the bag.
‘We shouldn’t have just turned up like this.’
‘No, I’m glad you did,’ Emma replies automatically, before realising it’s true.
Flames dance behind the grille of the fire as Janet wraps James and Dylan in sheets, tying each grandson round his middle, like a parcel. A pair of lit candles sit on the side, barely penetrating the incoming dark, but with the children dashing about in flapping robes Emma won’t light any more in the lounge in case of accidents.
‘Sit down,’ Emma says to Ruth, and she sits heavily beside the fire.
‘Oh, I was … never mind,’ Janet says, and Ruth shuffles to the middle of the sofa.
The stepladder tree which had seemed smart and amusing when Emma first thought of it is now so underwhelming, she feels stupid. She glances at the box of batteries on the floor beside Janet’s keyboard and remembers the snowflake lights in the cupboard under the stairs.
‘Back in a moment,’ she says.
She crouches in the cupboard, delving one hand into the box of decorations while directing the torch beam with the other. Lights found, she straightens as much as she can and, as she backs out of the cupboard, her sore shoulder clips the consumer unit. She swears under her breath and then, in response to a sudden stab of suspicion, flips the consumer unit’s lid.
The individual breaker switches point up, a line of raised hands in answer to her question. But the main switch, red, and twice as wide as its neighbours, points down. Emma’s mouth drops, too. The power cuts. Every time she has been interrupted, inconvenienced, upset, Chris has watched from on high, toying with her like a god.
She pushes the switch up and is greeted by the sound of the microwave pinging back to life and exclamations from the lounge. She returns the snowflake lights to the box and remains crouched on the floor for a moment, hurt and furious.
‘Well, there’s an answer to prayer!’ Janet’s exclamation flies from the lounge and into the cupboard where it adds to Emma’s anger.
She once read a translated novel in which home was described as a third skin. The description interrupted her reading and she paused to look it up, discovering a reference to epidermis, clothes and house: one, two, three. The house has been cool all winter thanks to the shut-off boiler. She has put up with it – wearing an extra layer, knitting herself a poncho, leaving the oven door open after baking – all the while joking with the boys about hardiness and their northern roots. She has done her best to understand and accommodate Chris’s fear, and for him to inflict it on her in this particular way, ruining her Christmas hospitality for his family, literally keeping her in the dark, feels like a personal attack. A piercing of her third skin.
She’d intended to fetch Chris. He can wait, she decides, stepping back into the hall and heading to the kitchen where she turns on the oven. He can wait until she can be bothered to shrug on her coat and splash across the flooded patio. It’s her turn to play God. Maybe she’ll leave him there for a while. How about three days and three nights? They liked threes in Biblical times, didn’t they? Does she like them, too? She entertains the thought for a moment and then dismisses it. Of course she can’t: he’ll get thirsty, he’ll need to use the toilet, and it’s Christmas Day tomorrow. But she could, she thinks; she could.
In the lounge, Ruth’s boys lie on the floor, side by side, eyes closed, as Dylan stands over them. ‘Right, sleeping lions, you need to—’
‘Isn’t it dead lions?’ Rob asks.
‘Sleeping lions,’ Dylan replies.
‘Oh, I’m sure we used to—’
‘No laughing, from now,’ Dylan says. ‘First to laugh is out.’
Elijah laughs.
Emma edges around the boys and presses the switch on the plug beside the stepladder tree. The Christmas lights come to life and instantly the room looks better.
‘Any word from Chris?’ Janet asks.
‘He left his phone charging upstairs,’ Emma replies carefully.
‘You’re definitely out now,’ Dylan says to Elijah. ‘Come on. You’re a big boy; no whining.’
‘You took the words right out of my mouth, Dylan,’ Rob says.
‘You can have them back; they’re covered in spit.’
Rob laughs.
‘It’s not so bad, Elijah,’ Dylan cajoles. ‘You get to help me judge.’
‘How long do you think Chris will be?’ Janet asks.
Having already lied to Janet and the boys, it should be easy to re-enact the deceit, but Emma hesitates; it’s harder in front of Ruth and Rob.
‘Well, he’s on foot,’ she says. ‘It’s a couple of miles each way, and there’s water everywhere. He’s probably stopped to help someone.’
‘Oh yes, of course!’ Janet likes this idea. Emma anticipates her development of it and, sure enough: ‘He’ll be an answer to someone’s prayers. I expect he’s providing a family with their very own Christmas miracle as we speak.’
‘He wasn’t very keen on doing that this morning,’ James remarks.
‘So it’s more likely he’s doing it now, to make up for it.’
No one disagrees with Janet in the lull that follows.
‘He won’t want to miss the nativity,’ she continues. ‘Let’s hold off and wait for him.’
They will wait, then. It will give Emma time to cook and, with the lights on, the gingerbread cooling, and the frozen party food in the oven, Chris will re-enter the house knowing he’s been found out.
‘Come on, then,’ Dylan says to the cousins. ‘We’ve got the games ready and we’re going to absolutely thrash you.’
Ruth’s boys scramble to their feet. Emma gently removes Janet’s hobby horse from Elijah as he passes; no good can come of him taking it upstairs. He opens his mouth to complain but changes his mind and turns on his heel as the others push through the door and thunder up the stairs. Emma follows them out and slips into the kitchen where she fills the oven with gingerbread, removes the quiches and cheese straws from the freezer to go in next, and places several mince pies on a Christmas plate.
‘She goes to the gym every morning, don’t you?’ Rob is saying when Emma returns, carrying the plate. ‘Come on, show us your muscles, Ruth.’
Ruth ignores him, blatantly, making no pretence of preoccupation or mishearing. Emma closes the door behind her and sits on the carpet beside the mince pies. Rob starts to stand but Emma waves him away.
‘Sit down. I’ll be getting up in a bit. For the gingerbread,’ she says.
‘You don’t do yoga, do you?’ Janet asks Ruth.
‘She runs,’ Rob says. ‘What’s the problem with yoga?’
‘It’s dabbling.’
‘Dabbling?’
‘In you know what.’
‘Shall we have some music?’ Emma suggests.
‘Opening the door to deceptive spiritual influences.’
‘Mum,’ Ruth says.
‘Magic and witchcraft.’
Rob laughs. ‘Janet, you are priceless.’
‘Oh, it’s no laughing matter.’
‘Did you practise the “Calypso Carol”?’ Emma asks. She kneels and picks up the keyboard. ‘Would you play it for me?’
She passes the keyboard to Ruth who places it on Janet’s lap. Then Emma sits again, back against the wall, knees up.
Janet presses a button. A bossa nova drumbeat sways into the room and she sings, mouth wide, forehead creased in concentration, her tuneful voice increasingly reedy with age.
‘Oh, now carry me to Bethlehem …’
For years it seemed to Emma that there had been a misunderstanding between Chris and his parents, and if she just tried hard enough, she might fix everything. But she is coming to believe that the misunderstanding was all hers, and Chris and his parents understood each other perfectly, choosing to occupy trenches of their own making, while she bounced between them, like an idiot stretcher-bearer. He’s on his own now, she thinks. The rescue effort, such as it was, has ended.
Janet stops playing, leans her head back and closes her eyes for a moment. It’s warm and cosy in the lounge. Emma is drowsy, too; her head aches, and she feels a little feverish, as if she is coming down with something.
‘You know what you’d enjoy, Mum? The carol service on the radio.’ Ruth fiddles with her phone. ‘I think I …’
‘I can bring the radio in from the kitchen,’ Emma offers.
‘It’s all right, I’ve got an app,’ Ruth says as a male voice emerges, reading scripture.
‘Oh, lovely. Can you turn it up a bit?’ Janet asks.
Emma thinks of Chris, outside in the cold and dark. She thinks of the dead rabbit lying in the washing basket on the passenger seat of her car. She closes her eyes and opens them later – moments or minutes, she can’t tell – to discover Janet, fast asleep, face pinkened by the heat from the fire. ‘Still, still, still,’ a choir sings from Ruth’s phone. ‘Sleep, sleep, sleep.’ And despite the sounds from above – heavy feet and the boys’ hooting laughter, the adults are all following the choir’s command. Emma wants to comment on their tiredness, a little joke about their age might excuse her, as she too surrenders to the feeling. But the words are stuck in the back of her throat and she can’t quite angle them out.
There is something she should do. The gingerbread. She must check on it. But her legs are like logs, and when she tries to stand, her co-ordination is off, and her arms lack the strength to push her body up from the floor. She decides to leave it for the moment. She is so snug, and warm. And there is music, beautiful Christmas music: boys’ voices soaring and swooping as her eyelids droop and everything turns dark.
When you’re born first, you’re the yardstick, and if you’re unlucky enough to be followed by someone who is a tiny bit cleverer, politer, and less primed for trouble, you’re going to look bad. Dylan looked bad for years but, recently, the adults in his life have started to comment on his newfound maturity. Kids, though, can see some of the old mischief. There’s something in Dylan’s expression and stance that reveals itself at opportune moments: as a kid braces themself in the face of a bollocking, or is shushed while they’re trying to say something important, Dylan glances their way and some fellow feeling passes between them.
The truth is, Dylan hasn’t changed much. He’s essentially the same as he always was, it’s just that partway through high school, he worked out how to speak to adults. Previously he’d been going about it all wrong: trying to make them laugh, saying the first thing that came into his head, interrupting, teasing – sometimes he hadn’t done anything yet he still managed to rub people up the wrong way. Like back in Year 7 when he told Miss O’Donnell, his RE teacher, that he and James were Irish twins. Miss O’Donnell said it was offensive. Dylan initially thought she was upset by the maths of it, that she found it shocking to hear about the extent of his parents’ shagging during the academic year in which he and James had been born. But she had meant it was racist. She basically called him a racist in front of the whole class during his first week of high school. It wasn’t as if he and James were the ones who’d come up with the description, they’d copied it from Nan – it had seemed a convenient way of explaining that yes, the two of them were in the same school year and no, they weren’t twins.
Peeved and embarrassed, Dylan felt it was only fair Nan be taken to task, as well. But whenever he saw her, he couldn’t find it in himself to say anything. Grandad was still alive then, and he was the disagreeable one, making unasked-for pronouncements like, ‘God has always been clear that marriage is between a man and a woman.’ Dad would rise to the bait – ‘What sort of marital relations are God’s favourite? Concubines, polygamy, inheriting your brother’s wife after his death …?’ – while everyone sat in awkward silence and Dylan tried not to laugh.
It was easy to attribute Nan’s silence to the secret adoption of Diet Coke versions of Grandad’s full-strength views. But not long after Grandad died, Dylan remembers popping out to the caravan with Dad on some errand or other and mentioning to Nan that he wanted to get home in time to watch the football.
‘Oh, that’s fine. I like to watch the Olympics when it’s on. Anything with horses. And that nice lady presenter. The one with the short hair. You know, I’m sure she could find a nice man, if she’d only try.’
It occurred to Dylan then that maybe Nan felt the same as Grandad but expressed herself with a greater degree of caution because, unlike Grandad, she wanted to be liked. It had already dawned on him that teachers wanted to be liked as much as he did, and he’d started to pay attention.
Mr Morgan (Drama) was forever mentioning his son, our Jonnie. Mr Adams (PE) was fanatical about Newcastle United. Ms Gatehouse (English) had started a lunchtime Writing Club.
‘How’s your Jonnie getting on …
‘Good result for the Toon last night …
‘Many people at Writing Club today?’
James laughs at Dylan’s efforts and says he’s probably a psychopath, going around memorising useful stuff about people and using it to his advantage. The thing is, Dylan likes people (except Miss O’Donnell). There’s a lot of stuff he struggles to remember, but information about other humans sticks. He’s a Sports Leader (Level 2) which means he occasionally gets to miss lessons to go to primary schools and help with team tournaments and sports days. Mr Adams lets him loose on the tricky kids. Awkward, uncooperative, stroppy – Dylan doesn’t care; almost without exception difficult people need two things: a friend and a responsibility.
It’s the same with the cousins now. Dylan is Sports Leader as they play the chocolate game, taking it in turns to scramble into a hat, scarf and gloves, and trying to cut squares of the big block of chocolate with a knife and fork before the next six is rolled. Sometimes the die goes under the bed and then it’s up to him to retrieve it, awkwardly – he’s wrapped in a sheet, after all – and announce the number. Depending on the state of play, he lies. Elijah has cried several times, which is par for the course, but he has yet to dash downstairs on a tale-telling mission. When it’s not Elijah’s turn, Dylan gives him jobs.
‘Can you turn the gloves the right way out for me …
‘Can you roll up the scarf …
‘You’re a great helper!’
Piece. Of. Cake.
When the chocolate is all eaten – a good portion of it smeared, handlebar moustache-like, across Amos’s upper lip and cheeks – they begin their next game: Beanboozled. James decides it must be possible to tell the difference between the jelly beans. Stinky socks or tutti-frutti? Dog food or chocolate pudding? He observes everyone’s selections and muses over his own – if there’s a way to avoid the disgustingness of rotten-egg-, stinky-socks- and baby-wipe-flavoured beans, James believes he can discover it.
‘There should be a stinky-cheese-flavour bean,’ Nathan says as James flicks the spinner. ‘Aunty Emma bought us this book called The Stinky Cheeseman. Instead of gingerbread, an old woman—’
‘Makes a man out of stinky cheese,’ Elijah interrupts.
‘And no one chases him because he smells so bad,’ Nathan continues.
Dylan remembers the book. It’s possible the cousins were given his and James’s old copy.
‘And there’s an ugly duckling,’ Amos adds. ‘But he doesn’t turn into a swan, he—’
‘Grows up to be an ugly duck.’
‘Elijah! Stop butting in,’ Amos says.
‘Best of all is the Red Riding Hood poem,’ Elijah adds, undeterred.
‘That’s from a different book,’ Nathan says.
‘The small girl smiles. One eyelid flickers. She whips a pistol from her knickers.’ Elijah falls about, laughing. ‘From her knickers. That is the best poem.’
Sometimes, when his dad is driving, Dylan’s mum reads aloud in the car. It used to be the funny stuff the cousins are discussing, but now she reads things she liked when she was a teenager. There was this poem she read not long ago about a bloke looking at a painting of his dead wife. ‘You must have done this at school?’ she said to Dylan and James, but they hadn’t. She paused to read one part twice, saying it was her favourite: ‘Just this. Or that in you disgusts me.’ Afterwards, when Mum and Dad were busy, James said, ‘Who do you think Mum was talking about when she read that bit?’
‘What do you mean?’ Dylan replied. ‘It was the bloke in the poem, talking about his wife.’
‘I know that.’
‘But?’
James shrugged. ‘Do you think they even like each other?’
‘Who?’
‘Never mind.’
Dylan watches as James flicks the spinner and the cousins crowd him, crouching on wobbly knees, robes tucked into their trousers. While James examines the contents of the box, Dylan thinks of his dad who likes to go on about his weird childhood and how hard it was to grow up believing Grandad and Nan’s story of a God who was all set to come back and slaughter everyone He didn’t like. Well, at least that story had rules. There were good guys and bad guys, and you could opt out of destruction by being holy. Dad’s story is much worse. Everything’s going to shit, and it’s random. There’s no protection; goodness won’t save anyone. If the world could just hang on for a bit, Dylan would appreciate it: he doesn’t want to die a virgin.
He saw something this afternoon. He hasn’t told anyone, not even James, though he had the perfect opportunity to exchange confidences when, not long before the cousins arrived, James whispered, ‘I kicked some nails into the road the other day. They were lying on the pavement, outside a house with scaffolding. I reckon Dad’s puncture was my fault. What if he hasn’t gone back for the beanie? What if he’s gone for an argument with the people who dropped the nails?’
‘Heavy,’ Dylan replied, uncertain if his own secret would make James feel better or worse.
While scoffing a third mince pie, despite explicit instructions to the contrary, Dylan had seen something. Mouth full, jaw working nineteen to the dozen, he’d glanced out of the window as his dad toppled his mum. Shocked, he ducked, raising his head again in time to see his dad stride into the garage. Then his mum locked the door and disappeared into the gap beside the fence. He did nothing, and it has been gnawing at him all afternoon. Dad is trapped in the garage like a wild animal and Nan thinks he’s on his way back from town having done something heart-warming.
Dylan understands anger’s trajectory, the way it fires straight to feet and fists. He’s been in plenty of scraps. Once, he and Callum properly lamped each other: crack, smash, whack, thump, on and on it went until finally, circling between strikes, they saved face by allowing Toe-head and Jonesy to separate them. Dylan also understands less urgent compulsions to wound. He and Toe-head went through a stage of giving each other dead arms until a particularly hard thump resulted in Toe-head hurrying home in tears. For a while, the four of them would intermittently trip each other as they walked around school. There have been protracted episodes of kecking, benching and wedgies. But Dylan has never hit Jonesy who is slight and a good head shorter than him. And he has never hit a girl.
Finally, James selects his bean, and the cousins hold their breath.
James groans. It’s not peach; it’s vomit flavour. He crouches on all fours, pretending to gag as the cousins laugh.
Dylan watches dispassionately. He wonders whether it is cold in the garage.
Just you knocking my mum over disgusts me, he thinks.
Janet’s heart, her personal metronome, the first of her organs to form and function, started as the fusion of two tiny tubes, and then bloomed into four chambers, beating for the first time in the damp, dark hollow of her mother’s uterus. For decades this complex swirl of muscle, protected by a tough, double-layered sac, has been pumping blood to her lungs to receive fresh supplies of oxygen. Janet’s heart has kept time through the many disappointments of her life. Subjected to unkind words and unwelcome events, it has taken feelings that are low in happiness and added a fresh supply of optimism, circulating newly aerated versions of the truth. Now, having beaten more than two billion times, Janet’s heart slows.
Her head aches and, despite the fire, the room is newly cold. Never mind, it’s Christmas. And what a Christmas it is! She could hardly believe the moment when the doorbell rang and, having hurried to answer it, she discovered Ruth and Rob and the boys, like the Norman Rockwell painting – though there was no snow and everyone’s feet were covered in mud, and Ruth was soaked and not merry at all. But the children – three Wise Men, heads topped with crowns, robes tucked into their trousers, Elijah’s mouth as chasmal as the boy’s in the painting – were exactly as they should be, excitedly awaiting admission. And there were cries of ‘Merry Christmas’ as Janet, like an innkeeper, said, ‘Come in, come in.’
Now her daughter sits beside her, while her son performs a series of good deeds in town: pushing a stalled car through flood water, placing a ring of stones around the lip of a close-to-overflowing pond to save the fish – Janet can picture it all. Though the pain in her head is blossoming into something thick and viscous, and she is assailed by waves of tiredness, she is lucky, isn’t she?
Janet’s eyes close as her blood pressure drops. The tide of her life recedes, and thoughts are left stranded like shallow pools on a beach.
Once, she was a little girl, running through the streets to feel alive …
What a gift it was to learn to play the piano …
How she loved Frank in the beginning, when love was unintentional.
Here she is, singing a solo in church … Here she is in another church, directing the choir … Here she is accompanying the Sunday School of a different denomination … Here she is in the front room at Victory Avenue, playing hymns for the service Frank, having run out of congregations, delivers himself … Having been sanded and polished by memory, each of these musical moments is now equally happy.
Here are the births of her children, agonies unremembered, her body parting like curtains to reveal first Chris, and then Ruth …
Here are the children in the kitchen of the farm cottage, back door propped open, the warm smell of the fields blowing in on the …
Here are the peaceful mornings in the caravan while Frank was out walking … email subscriptions for daily inspirational thoughts landing in her inbox like blessings. She knew the contents of the emails were the same for everyone, but someone wrote ‘Dear Janet’, didn’t they? She always liked …
Here are the bedtimes when Frank, come to say goodnight, turned out the light for her, and she lay, covers touching her chin, like her younger, tucked-in self …
Janet opens her eyes. It’s an effort to raise them but worth it, as there’s Frank, waiting in the corner, beside Emma’s ridiculous ‘tree’. Where has he been all this time? A choir sings – what lovely music! She would stand and follow the sound but something strange has happened. Her legs are no longer hers. Neither are her hands. She can see her fingers splayed, motionless on the keyboard, yet they feel separate from her and, vision tunnelling, Janet decides she doesn’t need them any more. Her inside parts, caught in the net of her skin, feel liquid and, as the world contracts, it seems she might leak through the latticework and follow the sound of the choir.
Her heart struggles now. There is not enough oxygen to meet her brain’s demand and Janet is carried on a tide of oblivion, past thought and back to her beginnings. Her heart, her first organ, the simple, paired tube that folded and looped, separated and divided, then beat, and beat, and beat, is finally beaten.
She closes her eyes. This time, forever.
It is dark, now.
In the beginning the earth was without form and void.
In the end it is the same.
Sometimes Dylan’s mum makes bread at the weekends and the smell creeps up the stairs and wakes him. He’s got a nose for food. It’s been a family joke since he was small, another label with which he’s been tagged: ‘Dylan, the sniffer dog’.
Now, as James kneels on the bedroom floor inspecting jelly beans, the cousins already laughing in anticipation of his imminent flavour-failure, Dylan smells something. He opens the bedroom door and inhales. Gingerbread. Not entirely pleasant: there’s a toasted edge to it.
He emulates the cousins, tucking the bottom of his sheet into the waistband of his jeans before taking the stairs two at a time, one hand sliding down the bannister, the other palming the wall. The lounge door is closed. He can hear carols playing. Mum must have lost track of time.
‘You need to …’ Dylan begins as he steps into the room.
What a joke they are playing! Nan, slumped at the end of the sofa, keyboard on her lap. Rob and Ruth, fast asleep beside her. And Mum, sitting on the floor, back to the wall, legs stretched out, head lolling to the side. Sleeping lions, all four of them, no sign of movement or laughter.
Very funny, he thinks. Hilarious! He thinks this for longer than is reasonable because the alternatives are unthinkable.
‘Ha-ha,’ he says, his voice uncertain, so it comes out like a question: ‘Ha-ha?’
No one moves and Dylan is afraid.
Have they been hurt? Is there an intruder in the house? His heart thumps as he scans the room. But there’s nowhere to hide. He notes the plate of mince pies on the floor beside his mum’s foot. But he has eaten three. And he’s fine. Dylan crouches beside her. It’s like a spell, he thinks: the princess pricked her finger and fell asleep, and the king, queen and servants all slept, too. He doesn’t touch her in case, inexplicably, it is something infectious. He remembers James talking about refugee children in Sweden who lost the will to live and entered a coma-like state following the trauma of being told they were going to be deported. He thinks of what his dad did, earlier: the thud as his mum hit the ground.
His dad. His dad, outside.
Dylan skids into the kitchen and grabs his mum’s coat from its hook, frisking it until he finds the garage key.
The back door slams into the worktop edge as he flings it open. His feet splash straight across the patio: trainers, socks and the bottoms of his jeans instantly soaked. He leads with the key, holding it out in front of him like a wand, as if there is magic in its notches.
The world was always going to end. It ends now as Chris sits on the hay bale in a shallow, alcohol-infected doze, the tide of his breath drying furrows into the roof of his mouth.
He dreams he has built a house on the sand, near the pier. There is samphire growing beside the front door and the views from its windows are astonishing, yet he is filled with dread because he knows the water is coming and he has no idea why he has done this foolish thing.
He stands in the lounge of the improbable house, family around him, as he explains the gravity of their situation.
‘In the coming years, one in nine people will be on the move,’ he lectures, pacing, just as his father, in his house-church phase, paced on Sunday mornings when Chris was a teenager, his steps a percussion accompaniment to long, fraught sermons.
The boys aren’t paying attention. Dylan wears headphones; James holds a magazine in front of his face. When my father spoke, I listened, Chris thinks, momentarily forgetting his own escape, not via music or literature but a job at a garden centre since, in his father’s mind, work was the only legitimate excuse for absence.
‘By the year 2200 the sea levels will have risen by almost ten metres. And that’s probably wrong – estimates are always too conservative.’
‘We’ll all be dead,’ Emma says gently.
What rubbish, Chris thinks, 2200 isn’t so far away.
‘The whole town will disappear,’ he continues.
‘You can’t know that.’
‘You think they’ll build a wall here to protect us? You think they’ll bother? In the desolate north?’
‘We’ll all be dead,’ she says again.
‘Shut up,’ he replies, as scared of her words as he is of the incoming tide.
If there were only cliffs, he thinks. But no. In East Anglia, the sea is eating the cliffs while the government adopts a strategy of ‘managed realignment’, and in Happisburgh, near Norwich, people are retreating from the earliest known human settlement in Europe. There’s something portentous about that.
‘Silly man,’ Emma says. ‘You can’t stop the future.’
‘Shut up.’
‘If you can just retain some hope in the present—’
‘I don’t want hope,’ he shouts.
A tot of dread, a nip of horror, a shot of anger – he isn’t asking much. If Emma would only join him in a measure of something. It’s all right for her; she doesn’t spend her days outside, trying to shape the world in ways that are less and less possible.
‘You’re a hypocrite,’ he says. ‘That poem? Rage, rage against the dying of the light. “Ooh, I love it!” you said. But you’re not enraged by anything, are you?’
And then he hears the water. He turns in time to see it charging towards his foolish house, waves rolling over each other like separator blades on a thresher. The boys – Dylan, deafened by his headphones; James, blinded by the angle of his magazine – haven’t noticed. Emma sees though, and, placing her hand on his shoulder, murmurs, ‘Many waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods drown it.’
Chris shrugs her off and concentrates on the water, coming at them like the future. He is not a strong swimmer. He will struggle to save himself, never mind his family.
The water comes and comes. He is hypnotised by it: reeling, roaring, never quite arriving. Eventually, he glances back into the world of his house, his lounge. While he has been studying the water, time has passed. Emma is old. And the boys are gone.
It smashes him, then. An uppercut to his exposed jaw, chased by a full body blow, rendering him helpless as the house collapses and his lungs flood. He is gasping, struggling against the pressure when the garage door bursts open, and the darkness is divided.
Chris starts. He coughs, the inside of his mouth bone-dry and rippled.
It’s not Emma come to liberate him. Though it could be an angel, he thinks for a moment, confused by the figure’s bright torso. But no, it is Dylan, insensible and frantic, inexplicably wrapped in a sheet. The water must be in the house. Chris shoots to his feet, swiping strands of hay from his clothes. He should have filled the sandbags. But he was busy drinking, caught in a loop of poor me. Disgusted with himself, he staggers after Dylan, through the standing water that hasn’t yet breached the back door – not that, then. But there is something else, something bad; he can hear it in Dylan’s repeated ‘Dad, Dad!’
The lights are on. Emma must have discovered the flipped switch. His stomach plummets as he wonders what she will say and, worse, what he will offer by way of explanation. Having grown and justified the idea in the shelter of his own thoughts, only now does he doubt its ability to withstand the blaze of her scrutiny.
The kitchen smells of burning sugar and Chris’s concern eases as he pauses in front of the oven, twists the dial and opens the door. Smoke billows into the room. There, he thinks. But Dylan grabs his arm and pulls him on.
The scene in the lounge seems staged. Unreal. Chris curses his vodka-fogged thoughts. Four statues. Pillars of salt. As if they’ve been touched by something supernatural. The world has stopped, and he must start it again.
For a moment, Chris considers that this may be the second in a series of nightmarish dreams and there could, therefore, be a simple solution, a way of outsmarting his imagination and undoing whatever has happened. Naaman, touched by leprosy, and King Midas, by his own greed, washed themselves in rivers. Is water the key to this sickness, too?
But no – he is awake; the soles of his feet pressed to the floor, hands clenching and unclenching, stupefied by confusion. Christmas music streams from a phone on the floor beside the sofa. ‘Who with his sunshine and his showers turns all the patient ground to flowers.’
Chris looks again: Emma’s daft tree is lit, and the room is toasty thanks to his mother’s fire – oh, the fucking fire. He curses and turns it off before dashing into the hall where he opens the front door, wide, propping it with a heavy bin bag lying nearby.
As cool air rushes into the house he thinks he hears the sea but it’s only his thoughts crashing against one another.
Back in the lounge he opens the windows. ‘Get them out, get them out,’ he says, while Dylan stands beside the sofa, as immobile as the others. Rob moans in response to Chris’s voice and Chris shakes him, hard. ‘Get up and get out.’
Rob tries to move and ends up on all fours.
‘Call 999,’ Chris says, suspending Dylan’s shock.
There is no time to weigh anything. Chris must carry someone out first. The decision is born of instinct but also comes down to this: who can manage without their mother? And the answer is: him.
Crouching, Chris grabs the loops on the waist of Emma’s jeans. Her face is flushed, and she is warm to the touch. He manoeuvres her so she is sprawled against his shoulder; then he struggles to his feet and, legs trembling, carries her into the hall like a sack of potatoes. ‘Tell them about the gas fire,’ he calls to Dylan.
His nephews appear on the landing, dressed as Wise Men, alongside James who, like Dylan, is wrapped in a sheet.
‘Boys, get down here and go outside. Round the back, now.’
‘I’ll take them,’ Dylan says.
‘Just call 999.’
‘What are you doing with Aunty Emma?’ Amos asks, hesitating at the top of the stairs.
‘Sleeping lions, for the grown-ups,’ Dylan says. ‘Come down, quick. Who wants to see some really burned biscuits? And who wants to stroke Girl Rabbit?’ He herds the boys into the kitchen and Chris hears his nephews’ muted responses to the burned gingerbread as he staggers out into the darkness.
Just put Emma on the drive, Chris thinks. It doesn’t matter about the wet; it’s the oxygen that’s important. But he can’t make himself do it. The vestiges of the dream – his foolish house, the menacing water – mean he can’t turn and leave her in the dark, on the remembering ground. What if he returns to discover she, like great chunks of the field opposite, has been reclaimed by the water?
Awkwardly, he tries the back door of her car. It’s unlocked. He kicks it wide and struggles to manage her weight as he bends, attempting to lay her across the seat. Once she’s in, he angles her on to her side and checks to make sure she is breathing.
As he skids back into the house, he hears James, on the phone.
‘… that’s right. The bridge is closed, though. Yeah … The long way round.’
‘I need help,’ he says to James.
‘No, I won’t hang up,’ James tells the operator, holding the phone with one hand and untying his sheet robe with the other. ‘But I’ve got to help my dad … Four. My uncle Rob’s breathing … No, he’s crawling … My mum, my aunty Ruth and my nan … I don’t know.’
Chris grasps Ruth under the arms. For some reason, she is wearing his mother’s dressing gown.
‘Grab her ankles,’ he says as James stuffs his phone in his back pocket and his sheet drops to the floor. ‘One, two, three, lift.’
Chris shuffles down the hall backwards, banishing thoughts of the young, bossy Ruth as he attempts to keep his emotions in check.
‘Hang on,’ James says.
Chris manages Ruth’s weight as James adjusts his grip, heaving one sturdy leg and then the other, until each calf is tucked under one of his arms and her knees sit just below his shoulders, round and stippled like wheels of blue-veined cheese.
They shuffle past Rob who has almost managed to crawl to the door but is resting now, forehead on the floor.
‘Where are we taking her?’ James asks as they step on to the drive.
‘To the car. If we can get her in the passenger seat, I can lie it back.’
‘Are you driving them—’
‘No, just getting them out here, into the fresh air.’
A washing basket sits on the passenger seat. There’s something in it, wrapped in a towel. It strikes Chris as odd until he remembers Emma’s earlier threat; she must have gone to the vet.
‘Move that out of the way,’ he says.
James relinquishes Ruth’s legs, leaving them sprawled on the wet ground. He removes the basket and adjusts the seat. They manage to heft her into it and tip her towards them, facing the open door. Then Chris belts her in.
It hits James, as they step back. Chris sees the horror on his face as he looks at Emma lying on the back seat.
‘Get your phone out and let them know what’s happening. And talk to Mum,’ Chris says. ‘Tell her about those birds, the storytelling ones. See if you can get her or Ruth to wake up while I get Nan.’
On his way into the house Chris steps over Rob who is vomiting on the doormat. Good, he thinks. And then he’s back in the lounge, lifting his mother’s hands from her keyboard. He puts it on the carpet and, kneeling, manoeuvres her on to the floor. He places his hands under her armpits and, apologising, drags her first into the hall and then the kitchen. Kneeling again, he clasps her wrist and feels for a pulse.
Nothing.
He uses three fingers in case he has missed it.
Silence.
He presses them to her neck, and waits.
There are runner bean seeds in a drawer behind him. Smooth and shiny, harvested from the inedible too-thickened coats of last year’s crop. All they need is a dark bed and a little water, and they will spiral skyward.
Death is a process, James says. Brain waves, like those experienced during sleep, can continue after the heart has stopped; brains and hearts may even have different moments of death.
In the face of further silence, Chris places the heel of one hand on his mother’s breastbone and the other hand on top. If only he could open her up and harvest something he might place in a dark bed, with a little water, allowing her to emerge again in the spring.
He isn’t counting; he doesn’t know the right numbers. It’s all compressions now, isn’t it? He thinks he’s heard that but can’t be sure.
Already tiring, Chris is aware again of music streaming out of the phone in the lounge, a carol he’s never heard before; a dirge, with no helpful beat to urge him on.
And they did eat, which was a sin,
And thus their ruin did begin;
Ruined themselves, both you and me,
And all of their posterity.
He swears – softly, in case his mother can hear – his strength briefly renewed as he pushes against the disagreeable words.
Dylan appears at the open back door. The nephews peep around him, faces pale, quiet for once.
‘Thirty compressions to two rescue breaths, Dad.’
‘Go away,’ Chris huffs.
‘We did it. At school. You need to lock your elbows.’
‘Go. Away.’
Dylan disappears with the boys. Chris counts to thirty, and then to two; thirty, and two.
If he is very lucky, this may be the middle of his life.
Thirty blows.
Might it be the end of his mother’s?
Two breaths.
She saw him into the world.
Thirty blows.
Is he seeing her out?
Two breaths.
He never asked what she really thought of her life.
Thirty blows.
Would she have even been able to tell him?
Two breaths.
Thirty, then two. Thirty, then two. Chris keeps going, shoulders burning, sweat gathering on his forehead. Until, finally, the choir’s mournful singing is interrupted by the sound of sirens wailing across the Moss.