So there’s these neighbours that live out past the quarry, down a rough track that goes nowhere and then stops at the edge of a slushy field. It’s low ground out there, and it rains more days than it doesn’t, giving the place a bottom-of-the-well kind of feel. The nettles grow to neck height.
There’s her house, and then, almost opposite, there’s his. They can see each other easily enough – whose car is there, whose lights are on. They can see through each other’s windows. There aren’t any trees. There aren’t any other houses. No one passes by. It’s just the two of them, but they haven’t spoken since the ditch started overflowing.
The ditch runs along the bottom of the track, and there’s a drain in the middle that serves both their houses. The drain is always blocked. When it rains, the water fills the ditch and starts spilling over. It rushes along the track and over the grass and pools outside their front doors. It happens every month, every week. The drain spits and gurgles and the water gushes out, greasy and rabbit-coloured. It smells like a jug that’s been holding flowers too long – that slick dark bit that gets left around the edges. Sometimes it seeps under their doors. Sometimes it seeps through their walls. In winter it freezes to a gristly crust. In summer midges spawn and dance over it.
But they never get it fixed. He thinks it’s on her land and so she should be the one to do it – he remembers seeing some kind of clause in some kind of document relating to the boundary line, although he’s misplaced the paperwork. She says it’s closer to his house and so it’s his responsibility – she’s measured the distance and there’s at least four inches in it.
She puts out sandbags. He buys a stiff broom and pushes the water away with sharp jabs. If they’re ever out the front at the same time they carry on in silence. She swings her heavy grey plait down behind her back. It’s like the pulley on a church bell except nothing chimes. He pulls the hood of his coat down low, so that only the frayed wires of his beard can be seen. Sometimes someone will shake their fist. When their doors slam, they echo across the fields.
The months pass, and then the years. They watch each other, they know each other’s small routines – how, on Mondays, she leaves the house at eleven and comes back at two, carrying a plastic bag with bread and some kind of bottle in it. How he stays in every day of the week except Sundays, when he goes out early and comes back at midnight on the dot, with dark lines below his eyes. How she never watches TV. How he leaves his bedroom light on all night. How she crushes tins so hard for the recycling that they split in the middle. How he carefully cleans his spades. How she checks twice that she’s locked the door behind her. How he checks that he’s locked his door three times.
Once in a while she looks out and sees that all his curtains are shut. They can stay like that for weeks.
Once in a while he smells smoke and sees that she’s having a bonfire; tearing out bits of paper from folders and feeding them into the flames. The cinders land on his van. They’re as big as fists.
He knows what days she washes her hair.
She knows what day he changes his bed.
Sometimes, at night, he thinks he sees a torch glinting around the track.
Sometimes, at night, she thinks she sees a torch glinting around the field.
If a delivery comes for her when she isn’t in, he doesn’t take it. He asks for it to be left outside her door instead. Often it gets wet. Sometimes deliveries don’t seem to arrive at all.
When he goes out on Sundays, she flattens the gravel outside her house, which his van has churned into divots. She picks up the sharpest bits and puts them on his drive.
The months pass and then the years. Still it rains most days. The drain blocks up and the ditch overflows and water pools in front of their houses.
One evening, at the tail end of winter, the rain is coming down as thick and heavy as a tap on full throttle. The gutters pour. The drops are fat and grimy and smear on the windows. She’s inside slicing the skin off potatoes, when she hears something scraping, then a thud. She goes over to the window and glimpses a torch somewhere down the track. The torch goes out. She starts on the potatoes again. The rain drums even louder. She cuts each potato and throws the pieces into a pan of cold water. They sink to the bottom. Something moves in the pelting rain and when she looks up he’s there, outside the window, staring in. His eyes are pale and watery. She puts the knife down slowly. She goes to the door and opens it a few inches. He’s hunched by the wall, wearing his mac and carrying a spade. There’s mud up his legs and his back, and along both sleeves. His hood is streaming. Water runs off the bones of his face.
‘Have you got a spade?’ he says.
She squints out past the door. The light outside is dark brown, almost green, mud-coloured. She can hardly see him through it. ‘Why?’ she says.
‘It’s blocked.’
‘It’s always blocked.’
He turns and looks down the track. ‘It’s pouring over.’ His voice is strange, lower than she remembers; it catches in his throat as if there’s water bubbling in it.
She closes the door an inch and stands behind it.
He pulls his hood down further. ‘I can’t do it by myself.’
She sees that his spade is clagged with dirt. ‘You’ve been trying to fix it?’ she says.
He turns again and looks down towards the ditch. He clutches the spade. The skin on his fingers is damp and crinkled. He opens his mouth and it looks, for a moment, as if a trickle of something dark comes out, but it must just be mud from his hood. He closes his mouth, swallows, and walks back onto the track. His spade scrapes on the ground. Water pours over the tops of his boots. He blurs into the rain and disappears.
She opens the door wider and stands there, looking out. She can’t really see anything except the rain. The water looks higher than usual – there’s a pool under the door already and it’s still rising. She looks back at her kitchen. The pool of water starts spreading. She unhooks her coat from the peg, pulls on her boots and gets her spade from the garage – it’s rusty and buckling but it will have to do. She steps into the water and follows him down to the ditch, bending her head against the force of the downpour. He’s walking slowly, almost bowed over, with one leg dragging. There are slabs of mud under his boots.
The ditch is overflowing fast. It’s gritty and thick and slopping out like bathwater going over the rim. He bends down and starts digging, bringing out spadefuls and throwing them over his shoulder. The ditch looks much wider than it was before. The bank has collapsed down one side, water is flooding out, and there’s mud and weeds choking everything. She leans in and digs, scooping out stones and roots. Sludge smears up her legs and hands.
After a while she notices that he keeps stopping and stretching his back. He tries to straighten it but it’s stooped, as if there’s something heavy pressing down on it. Sometimes he turns and spits behind him. His spit looks muddy. There’s mud in his teeth and under his nails. It looks like there’s water brimming under his coat.
She digs deeper, scooping out spade after spade of dirt and crushed nettles. The rain is like hands pummelling. It roars in her ears. The pile of mud is growing behind her, but the ditch is so deep and there’s so much slipped mud, it doesn’t seem like she’s even cleared half of it yet.
‘When did this happen?’ she says.
Another bit of the bank slides into the water – a chunk of clay and roots that calves off stickily.
She keeps digging and the shape of the ditch becomes clearer. It is bigger. The sides have been scraped and cleared and a channel has been dug through the bank. She digs again and finds a section of pipe that wasn’t there before. It definitely wasn’t there before. She digs around it. The pipe is long. It’s been laid in the channel and comes out onto her side of the track. Water is pouring out of it and diverting straight onto her land. She digs again. The pipe isn’t finished, but there are more sections in there ready to be joined together, and more channels that, once they’re finished, will siphon all the water off in the same direction.
She looks at his muddy coat, the mud on his spade. Suddenly she knows exactly what he’s been doing.
‘You underhanded bastard,’ she says. She clenches the spade, turns around, and raises it in the air.
He’s gone. He was standing right next to her and now there’s nothing. The rain is dark and cold. She scans the track, the field, but there’s no one there. She looks at the bank – there are no footprints where he was standing. The mud is smooth and clear, the grass is untrampled. She curses and swings her spade down deep into the water. It hits something solid. It doesn’t feel like rock, it feels softer than that, but harder than the mud.
She wades into the ditch to get a better look. The water sucks at her boots. She digs in again and hits the same thing. It’s down underneath where the bank has collapsed. It’s big. She prods carefully, loosening, lifting the mud around it. She gets her spade in one more time but can’t prise it loose. She kneels down and puts her arms into the water. It’s deep. It comes up past her elbows. The chill comes up past her neck. She reaches down and feels around and her fingers catch at something. She grabs it and pulls. It’s heavy, and it seems to be caught down there, wedged in under the piles of slipped mud. She pulls harder, leaning back with all her weight. The thing shifts. She reaches down, untangles a root, and moves some hard lumps of clay. She has a handful of dark, greasy cloth. She pulls again and steps back and more of it slides out.
Boots appear, then legs, a mac that’s sopping and daubed in mud, a hood that’s pulled down low over a wiry beard.
She picks up her spade and stands there for a long time. She looks down at the pipe, at the new channels cut into the bank, and the water pouring out across her land. She looks down at him. There are three deep spade marks – one in the top of his head, one in his chest, one in his thigh. His skin is as waxy as when you dig up a potato. He’s sodden and cold and his teeth are gritted in his jaw, almost, maybe, as if he’s grinning up at her.
Well, that’s what she says happened anyway.