January
The first was Lily Ennis and she did not go peacefully. It was just as the old year slipped into the new one and she clung on, gripping the chair. She’d always thought that the next year would be different – her son would phone, people would visit, someone would beg her to stop smoking. After all, it wasn’t up to her to do everything, was it? She clung on. She waited. She’s still waiting, actually. When the phone rings, there’s a dry intake of breath. In the mornings, there are dents in the arms of the chair.
Next was Riley – sometimes, out of the corner of your eye, you might see him wandering around, talking to himself, wringing his hands. Maybe it’s because of the things he did, or maybe it’s because of the things he didn’t. There he goes now, with his head down, hurrying past.
It’s hard to keep track sometimes, what with all the comings, what with all the goings. Every bloody year it’s like this – everything changing, everything staying the same.
Violet always swore she’d be kinder.
Lenny always said he’d fix that loose rung on his ladder.
Selwyn made a thousand resolutions. He was going to see an iceberg. He was going to settle down. He would never be late again. You can see his car on its side in the hedge. In spring, it gets covered over when the leaves grow thick. In winter, it shows through again. Thistles are growing in the tyres. There’s a bird’s nest in the exhaust.
And then there was that man at the crossroads, what was his name? He didn’t make any resolutions at all. For him it was better if nothing changed. He’d fallen in love once and look how that turned out. One year blurred into the next, keeping himself to himself, following his own strange routines. He lived by the bus shelter (there’s no buses, the timetable’s ten years old; there’s just a mouldy armchair someone dragged in to help with the waiting). Every year the nettles come up, every year they die back down. He was keeled over in the verge for a month up there before anyone found him. He was up there for a month listening to a badger scratching up his bones.
February
That’s the thing – there’s a constant shifting of earth round here. It’s hard to keep track of it. Bulldozers, cement lorries, gardens ripped out for parking. Houses go up, houses come down. I’m supposed to be remembering, I’m supposed to be getting it all down, but all I can hear is digging and hammering.
Now someone’s tapping on windows. Who is it? It’s Jameson with his stick, out in the rain again, trying to remember where he used to live.
Wanda tried not to remember. She lay in bed listening to the young people speeding along the top road, doing two-wheelers round the bends. She’d done it herself a long time ago. She’d clipped someone in the dark. God, who was it? She hadn’t stopped. She hadn’t told anyone. The beat of the engines kept her awake all night. Finally she got up and climbed out of the window. She stood in the road with her arm raised to slow them down. The headlights passed straight through her.
Bradley gritted his teeth and swerved. He crawled out of the windscreen without looking back. He was only nineteen. Now he hangs around on empty farms and outside pubs. No one wants to be the one to say it, but things haven’t turned out too differently for him after all.
It turned out Acer had a flair for making enemies.
It turned out everyone was a little bit in love with Annie.
Franklin, meanwhile, died of heartbreak. Don’t let anyone try to tell you it was a stroke, or angina. He had all the years mapped out, and then he woke up and his girlfriend’s shoes had gone, and her coat, and that suitcase she’d been keeping under the bed. He wrote letters and phoned her about a hundred times a day. He hung around outside her house until they made him stop. There’s a holly tree growing out of him now. It’s already covered in dark berries. When you walk past it reaches out and tries to snag your clothes.
In the next row across, there’s a couple who’d been married over seventy years. They were buried side by side, as close as it was possible to get. If you look carefully you might see a gap appearing, hardly anything, a millimetre, then another millimetre – the kind of thing the gravedigger, a man of geography, would put down to shifting bedrock, or the damn moles, or one of those sinkholes that may one day open up and swallow everything.
March
The cliffs crumbled. A pockmark eroded into a crack, the crack widened until a small overhang broke off and shattered on the beach, exposing smooth shale underneath; the disgruntled fossil of something that remembered better days, when this place was a vast lake next to a mountain range. No one really noticed.
No one noticed the woman going in for a swim either. It was the last day of her holiday and she had that not-quite-left, not-quite-here-any-more feeling. Her bags were packed in the car. The cleaner was sweeping her away. The rip took her out almost to Lundy.
It finally gave back Mr Edwards, though, about forty years too late. There he is in the shallows – washing in and out, thin as a strand of kelp, practically see-through actually. Not a kind man. No one wants to be the one to say it. But maybe a changed man, what with the way the water has smoothed out his bones, the way those barnacles have found the gaps between his fingers.
When Jamie Silver washed off his boat in a storm he made sure he wouldn’t be found. He was a claustrophobic man – he didn’t want a wooden box, or the hard, packed earth. He’d survived a war and three divorces. Someone had once hit him in the dark with their car. He knew the currents very well; he knew the deepest channels and the rocks he could snag on to. He knew how far he needed to go so that no one could bring him in, or fix him down, or say his life had been this or his life had been that. As far as he was concerned people could look, the meddling, good-hearted bastards, but thank God they’d never find him.
April
In April there was no one.
A dolphin was stranded on the stones. There was no one around apart from the fossil and the fossil didn’t give a shit. It had seen it all before. The dolphin started drying out. It forgot what being a dolphin was, until the tide came back in and it swam away and remembered.
A gun went off but I don’t think anything’s come of it yet.
Someone else came down to retire but I don’t think anything’s come of that yet either.
It’s hard to keep track though. Another supermarket went up practically overnight. Someone built a house in their back garden. The mud got churned, there was nowhere for the rain to go. The last lumps of snow melted and mixed with the soil to create a sort of slush – not liquid exactly, not exactly solid ground.
Lyn slipped into the river on her way home at night. Water poured into her shoes. It was very dark, very cold, and something heavy came down, like a lid closing over her. But she knew she’d get out. She’d had her palm read once and they’d said that her life would be full of tall, exciting men, and she hadn’t met any of them yet.
Lenny’s nephew almost used the same bloody ladder.
Yardley woke up during his funeral, banging etc.
No one knows what’s happened to Lonnie.
Lizzie Wheeler found out about the radioactive properties of granite. How the radon leaked out every day, every minute. How it was odourless and colourless. She started seeing clouds of gas hanging in the air. When she found a lump in her side, nestled under her ribs, she knew exactly what it was. The doctor referred her to the hospital for tests. She felt the lump every day, got to know its precise dimensions, its peculiar firmness. Then, one day, it disappeared. Reabsorbed, the doctor said, shaking her head. On her way home, Lizzie saw a cloud of gas right in front of her. She shivered and walked the long way around it.
And did you hear about Pinky Rowe, who walked unscathed in that lightning storm, carrying a metal umbrella?
May
In May the rain came. You know the kind – warmish, dampish, turning everything into pulpy paper. There’s nowhere to go in rain like that. Nothing to do. You suddenly realise the long distances. There aren’t many trees to hide under.
In Mikey’s house they found washing stolen off the neighbour’s line – socks, a nightie, three soft pillowcases.
In Sal’s there was a mace under the bed.
June
Someone’s watching out of that window. There’s a face, too blurry to properly see. It’s sort of mottled, sort of furtive-looking. Whoever it is they’re just standing there, watching, listening, even though someone’s come in and taken away the furniture, even though the curtains are down and the electricity’s been switched off. Look – their face is pressed right up to the glass, even though the carpets have been rolled, even though someone’s taken away the plates, and the chairs, and letters are banking up on the floor.
Ira didn’t take any notice of anyone. Other people and their troubles dripped off him like rain from a waterproof coat. No one’s judging – it would probably be blissful really, to not hear things, to not know things. Apart from the fact that he missed what everyone was saying about the eroding cliff path, but there are swings, aren’t there, and there are roundabouts.
Look, there goes Maurice again, circling the fields, ripping up handfuls of daisies. He does that every day without stopping. See the way he’s rushing, see the way his hands are shaking. It makes you think he must have done something terrible, the way he leaves flowers like that shoved under his wife’s door.
Leslie empties a bottle of Scotch every week on the ground where her father’s buried. The one time she forgot the grass withered up and turned as dry as ashes.
Which reminds me of something – what is it? Why’s it always up to me to remember everything?
That’s it. Mrs Edwards is still in the glove compartment of her daughter’s car, bumping softly every time it turns. She’s waiting to be let go of, waiting, finally, for when there’ll be no one orbiting around her like strange, lost planets.
Whereas someone who shall not be named (that old lech) has been shoved unceremoniously, and for all time, into the back of a cupboard.
We should spare a thought for Fuller too, shouldn’t we, who never got around to arranging his affairs. He always thought he had more time. He could have been scattered over the water, drifting with the seagulls, being pulled in all directions by the wind. Instead he’s on two different mantelpieces in hot front rooms, getting polished every day. It’s not so bad actually, except for the way the clocks tick slightly out of sync.
July
The rain turned into a heatwave overnight. The sand roasted. Mud dried for the first time in years. A gorse fire broke out. There was a landslip and the fossil fell onto the beach and was covered over again by stones, just as it had started to get used to things.
Jack Gilbert and Mitch Mitchell were old enemies. Neither of them could remember why. Their farms shared a border and they let out each other’s animals and lit dirty bonfires. So when smoke came up from Mitch’s place, Jack didn’t do anything about it. He went back to his house and watched from the window. The smoke thickened and hung in the air. It didn’t smell like one of his normal bonfires – it smelled like there was petrol in it. Mitch had probably left an old can lying around in the yard. He was, and always had been, a complacent man. Jack went to bed. He woke up the next morning with the taste of smoke in his mouth. It was in his hair and his clothes and now, according to him, it won’t come out.
Someone got stabbed with a kitchen knife. Someone else got poisoned or something. My God, it’s not like the old days round here is it; it’s not like those times you could keep your door unlocked. What with people wandering around with blood in their mouths and did you hear that shouting, that choking? I’m just saying.
Two sisters lived in flats one above the other. The smallest noises set them off. They heard each other’s TVs. They heard curtains opening and scraping across their runners. They heard each other’s breathing and the sounds they made when they were eating. The sister upstairs banged her feet on the floor. The sister downstairs climbed a ladder and banged with her hands. Their hearts went on practically the same day, but they’re still doing it – banging and cursing – and neither will be the one that stops first.
There was that woman who put a curse on her mother-in-law, wasn’t there? Of course, no one can prove it.
No one can prove who started the rift between the Randalls either. They’re a big, sprawling family and even they keep forgetting who’s aligned with who. There are cousins who don’t speak to cousins, aunts who don’t speak to nieces. The grandfather can’t go to the cinema any more because his grandson works there, even though he used to love the maroon seats, the musty smell of popcorn. One of the nephews was tiling his roof early in the morning, before the heat set in, when he fell off. There was no one around except his uncle, who was in the next field. The nephew didn’t shout to him for help. He couldn’t bring himself to do it. If only he’d just shouted. But you know what these things are like between families, don’t you – the way they’re deep and gleaming, like tin lodes.
August
Here are the last words of Yana: Can somebody …?
Here are the last words of Fletcher: Can anybody …?
No one heard the last words of Dina.
September
The cliffs down the coastline go like this: Mussel Rock, Pigsback Rock, Squench Rock, Cow and Calf, Tense Rocks. The sea chips away at them bit by bit.
A twelve-year-old boy called Rowan fell. His friends called him Yo-Yo. He tried to jump the gap that split a headland into two jutting points. He was wearing a red jumper and the red moved slowly down through the last dried pinks of the thrift and the heather. A group of oystercatchers went up like flares.
In their condolences everyone said he was too young, too full of potential. But the boy’s father, stunned and silent, couldn’t stop thinking of the boy’s wildness: he’d run away from home when he was eight, at ten had broken both wrists falling off a stolen quad. He remembered the hot night back in July when he saw the boy slip into his room, red-eyed and reeking of petrol. That’s when he should have done something, that’s when he should have stepped in. ‘But there was no proof,’ he murmured along to the eulogy. After the service, people kept asking why they could smell petrol in the church; did someone’s car have a leak that needed seeing to?
Daisy could see herself lying in hospital (she was somewhere at the back, towards the ceiling). Look at all the flowers and cards they’d given her. Listen to the nice things they were saying about her. She shook her head and tried to speak, to correct them – they didn’t know about the time she’d left her ailing, fractious mother in a room alone all day, did they? Or the twenty pounds she’d taken from that collection bucket, or how, when her daughter was four and wouldn’t stop biting, she’d bitten her right back.
Deano was noted for his wit. You should have seen his impressions. Everyone wanted to stand behind him in a queue; it made the time go so much quicker, it made the day a little bit easier. No one knew that every morning he had to roll his loneliness, his disappointments, down to his feet and step out of them, like a layer of old skin.
For Iris they sang ‘Abide With Me’ when she’d expected ‘Ain’t No Sunshine’.
For Peter they bought lilies, forgetting about his allergies.
Only five people came to Radley’s – since then he’s been passing through walls, knocking on doors, trying to make sure that no one forgets him.
No one’s forgotten Greta. She married all three of the Randall brothers and once beat Lonnie in an arm-wrestling match. She had a kind word for everyone, even if it was just the drink talking.
Clement, on the other hand, was an arsehole.
October
More houses went up. More gardens were ripped out for parking. It’s endless round here, isn’t it? There’s a constant shifting of absolutely bloody everything.
A boot washed up on the town beach. People said it was Jamie Silver’s. There was the mark of his needle and thread at the soles – no one else in town repaired their own shoes.
A hand washed up as well, but how am I meant to know who that belongs to?
Selma Richards left her body at the bottom of the stairs and got up feeling so much lighter. That thing had always been a burden, what with its aches and its twinges, its cracked veins and its dry skin, its ridged nails and its gammy eyes, its stiff hips and its dropped arches, its swollen glands and its knotty hair and its wisdom teeth only ever half coming through.
Giles left a house full of things he couldn’t throw away – damp newspapers, tins, plastic bottles. It was stacked up to the ceilings. He had his own elaborate systems. If you squint you might see him over there in the corner, slowly reordering it, folding bags, flattening cardboard boxes, dust in his hair, dust on his clothes. When he was nine, he’d thrown away his favourite toy – a bear with warm, coppery fur – because someone said he was too old for it. He’d looked for it for days but never found it.
There were a few more sloes, a few less people. The cliffs turned almost burgundy. Geese flew over, creaking like trains. There was one tangled in the weeds by the road, well, just its feathers – the whole thing sort of broken open the way a thistle-head opens.
Dooley, the thatcher, left his signature twist of straw in every roof in the area.
Gregory left nothing worth mentioning.
Myrtle left five sons, twelve grandchildren, eighteen great-grandchildren: a whole bloody dynasty.
November
Pinky Rowe went out in the lightning again. No one wants to be the one to say it, but people never really learn do they.
Farley, for example, never learned to say no to anything.
Hazel never gave up those burnt bits – the black edges of toast, the dark crackling, the scrapings at the side of the pot. The doctor said they’d take five years off her. It was probably worth it.
December
The problem is, there’s always too much happening. There’s one thing and then there’s always another. How am I supposed to get it all down, what am I supposed to say exactly?
I could tell you, I suppose, that Kenny’s last thought was the sound of the leaves on the poplar tree in his first garden.
And the last thought of Ikey involved that bright sauce from the Chinese takeaway. (He wished it had been something more highfalutin.)
Or maybe I should say that Vanda wished for one more kiss of the lobe of her husband’s ear.
Or that Opal’s wish was so small, so secret, that no one could hear?
Then there’s Davey, who could have.
And Bunny, who should have.
And what about Floyd, who’d done everything he wanted? When he’d worked at the pub on the cliffs collecting empty glasses, he held the record for a stack of fifty. He’d given money to charity, been a godfather to a baby. He’d stroked a tiger at the carnival, had witnessed a glittering sweep of phosphorescence out across the water. And once, he’d caught the cleanest wave at Salthouse and ridden it right in, the dark green of it arching beautifully, smoothly, behind his back.
What the hell am I meant to do with that?
Thank God the year’s almost ending. Although that just means there’s another one coming.
It’s hard to keep track, what with all the comings, what with all the goings. And I suppose it’s up to me to see what happens next, is it? The cliffs are still crumbling, the fossil’s getting buried deeper in the stones. Houses are still going up. Houses are still coming down. All that earth’s still shifting around. Every bloody year it’s like this – everything changing, everything staying the same.