by Helen Mort
‘No,’ said Leyton, softly. ‘She fell in a quarry.’
Alexa wished she didn’t feel guilty about the missed call last night, about barely even noticing that Caron didn’t sleep at home. It wasn’t unusual. She stayed out all the time. Why would a Sunday be any different? The remorse was bitter, acidic in her throat.
‘Who were you with?’
Caron’s lips were a tiny seam.
‘Well, who were you with?’
‘A friend.’ Her voice was hoarse.
The woman’s singing got louder, more despairing. Then, there was another sound, a gulping, sobbing sound and Alexa realised with surprise that it was coming from her. Her body dropped and the chair by the bed caught her, so she was half-sitting, rocking forwards over the bed as she cried. Caron put her arms round her and held her tight. The book slipped to the floor. Leyton shifted at the edge of the bed.
‘I’m sorry,’ Caron said into her hair. Then she said, ‘Happy birthday.’
Alexa wasn’t sure when the crying stopped, but she knew the old woman wasn’t singing any more, either. Now she was chanting something to herself in a deep mutter. It sounded as if she was saying later. Alexa tried to arrange herself upright. Caron nodded to Leyton.
‘Don’t just stand there,’ she said, gruffly. ‘You’re making the place look untidy.’
‘I need a fag,’ Leyton replied.
‘Me too.’ Caron had taken her blue nose-stud out. Alexa stared at the tiny hole at the side of her nose. It was the first time she’d seen it. Caron didn’t smell like herself, either. Too soft. Talcum powder, maybe. She was wearing pale green hospital pyjamas.
‘What’s the damage?’
‘Fractured pelvis. It isn’t as bad as they thought.’
Pelvis. For some reason it took Alexa a moment to recognise the word, to work out where the pelvis was. She thought about Caron’s small hips, the lamb-chop shapes her hip bones made when she lay flat on her back, as if they were pushing their way out of her skin.
‘Do you need anything?’ asked Leyton. Nursing didn’t suit him. He was fidgeting like an addict.
Caron gave him a shy smile. ‘Gin,’ she said. ‘Gin and sympathy.’
Caron wouldn’t look at Alexa directly, even though she gripped her hand. Alexa wondered how long it had been since she’d looked at her properly. She tightened her grip.
‘I’m sorry, chuck. You’ll have to wait for your birthday present.’
Alexa bent down to pick up the book from the floor. It was a paperback, something pop art about the illustration on the cover. The writer had a surname she couldn’t pronounce. As she went to place it on the table, she thumbed through the pages, as if it was one of those flick books, as if the corners of the pages might give something away. Just words. Westerly. Doorway. Star. Elsewhere. The title page at the front caught her attention for a second, though, because it wasn’t blank.
Caron, Don’t eat this all at once. L. xxx
She shut the book and skimmed it on to the table.
‘I should be at work.’
Her chest was filling with wet sand.
General Cemetery
They are never here at the same time, the young woman and the older man, but they’re both regulars. She prefers the top section, the descent from Psalter Lane. He likes to follow the line of the Porter Brook. I am vast enough to hold people at a distance. The gravestones are my teeth – important and unremarkable. Students in their first week of term wander in by mistake from the bustle of Ecclesall Road and stay, transfixed by the privacy, the extent of bramble. They step through the entrance, the gatehouse stern over the river, a symbol of crossing the River Styx, engraved with stone snakes – coiled, holding their tails in their mouths. Uphill, the neo-Gothic Anglican chapel, places where the grass hasn’t been tended, tries to claim the graves back. Moss and silence. A butterfly trembling low, afraid to settle.
Leigh
Leigh watched Caron’s girlfriend leave the hospital and stand outside the entrance for a moment like a kid at a swimming lesson. Her honey-coloured hair was scraped into a high ponytail. Her face was very drawn and pale. Strong cheekbones. She was wearing her police uniform, the neon yellow jersey with silver seams. She checked her watch, then started down the slope, past the car park. She walked more confidently than she stood. Seeing her from a distance, Leigh realised for the first time how tall she was.
Leigh didn’t intend to follow her. She had a plastic bag full of digestive biscuits and grapes, things you’re supposed to take someone in hospital. But here she was, keeping a steady distance in the scant shadow, away from the road. From time to time, Alexa glanced over her shoulder and Leigh flinched, but she was only looking for a gap in the traffic. At length, she crossed. A double-decker bus careered down the hill and Leigh had to wait for it to pass. Four blank faces stared out of the windows at her. When it trundled on, Alexa was revealed again. Leigh crossed, too, stuffing her bag of food into the bin next to the bus stop as she went.
At the police station Alexa scanned her card and pushed the glass doors and Leigh slunk behind the bushes, feeling like a stalker. She could see rows of faces lit behind the windows, hunched in concentration over their computers. It was a more bureaucratic place than she’d expected. She heard Pete talk about the police. Pigs. Scum. How could he have worked for them? She tried to picture his body in the uniform and couldn’t. She expected police headquarters to give off an air of safety. A fortress. But all the faces behind the glass looked harassed and worried. They were next to a busy main road and it seemed like the traffic hemmed the place in.
It occurred to her that Alexa might not be coming out again, but as soon as she’d thought it, her shape appeared. The bright jacket had gone and she was wearing olive, skintight jeans tucked into knee-high boots, a grey wool coat buttoned to the top. Effortless. Smart. Seeing her like that made Leigh feel ashamed of her own clothes. She followed at a safe distance, down the arterial road, over into the red-light district, where the night hadn’t started yet. Alexa glanced into every pub she passed and Leigh smiled privately, because she did that too. It wasn’t that she wanted to go in, it was just the idea that she could. The overly warm room. Bar staff who would make you feel like they wanted to talk to you, even if they were just being polite.
By the time they got to Ecclesall Road, Leigh was walking in a trance. She couldn’t remember what Alexa’s voice sounded like. Hearing it at the party wasn’t enough. She didn’t know whether she smoked or not. She didn’t know if she was close to her parents; if she grew up in a house with a neat lawn and flowers sprucing the path or a flat above the train station with eye-socket windows and walkways you could fall from. But she knew what she’d studied at university. How she hated to climb. What she drank. The trouble she had getting to sleep at night. How she liked to have her wrists tied and what with. How many sugars. Caron’s speech dripped with details. And everything Caron said about her filled Leigh with a strange curiosity. Almost a yearning. It wasn’t like when Tom talked about his girlfriend at all.
When Alexa turned off the main road towards Brincliffe Edge, Leigh hesitated. But she still found herself turning round at the top of the small hill, past Alexa and Caron and Leyton’s house. She stood for a moment, breathing hard. What was there left to do? Ring the fucking doorbell? As she moved away, she couldn’t help glancing back to the terrace with the lit window, where a woman was undressing, taking off her buttoned-up coat and her smart clothes, one by one, then remembering, facing the window, reaching wide to close the curtains.
When Leigh walked back down Ecclesall Road South, she realised how hungry she was. She stopped outside a small, well-lit Italian restaurant, family-run, flags on the wall and a large woman wrestling with a bottle of champagne behind the bar. The menu was short and predictable. Her eyes travelled from the board to the glass. There were only two couples in the place and, with a jolt, she took in Tom’s best coat, slung across the back of his chair, the close-cropped hair on the back of h
is neck. Tom’s girlfriend was leaning across the table towards him. Her strapless dress looked new and her thin, gold necklace caught the light. They touched glasses and, even though she didn’t hear it, the sound stayed in Leigh’s head. She turned back towards town again.
When Leigh lived far north for a year – her first and last attempt to get away from Sheffield – a woman was found dead in the lake. Everyone called it The Last Village. It wasn’t the last, or even the most northerly, it just felt like there couldn’t be anywhere further to go afterwards. Stuart the sheep farmer saw the dead woman, swept by the current under the bridge, a glimpse of raincoat and black hair and then gone. Instead of reporting it, he went straight to The White Lion and drained three pints of Guinness, mumbling into his tankard. He reckoned she was in her fifties. And he swore she’d looked right at him as the water dragged her away. His hands almost broke his glass. It was the landlord who phoned the police and made it into some kind of story.
When they found her, she was washed up by the shore of the lake, next to the flat green stones, and she wasn’t fifty but twenty. Leigh didn’t see the body, just the police cars blocking the main road and the team dredging the beach. But she couldn’t help imagining it. That night in The Lion, Stuart invented more and more details. He had seen her wristwatch. He knew it had stopped the moment she died. She was haunted. She was beautiful. By the end of the night, the dead woman might as well have been Stuart’s wife. At quarter past twelve, he slunk down off his bar stool, raised a hand and left the others to settle his tab.
When Leigh had got home that night, she was swaying and the house was very cold. She phoned her mum anyway, phoned her to tell her that she wasn’t the body in the lake. Her mum was half-asleep. Leigh didn’t explain herself very well. She was trying to say that she swam in that water every day, swam out under the reflection of the mountain and didn’t turn round until her bones contracted with the chill. But she was OK. She wasn’t the lost woman. She just got frightened when she swam sometimes, that moment when she turned around and had to turn her back to the mountain. She had to keep looking over her shoulder. None of this came out. Eventually, Leigh’s mum passed the phone to slick Derek, who made clicking noises with his tongue. This isn’t the time to be calling, Leigh-Ann. Your mother and I have a christening tomorrow. In West Didsbury.
He put the phone down and Leigh fell asleep with the receiver next to her ear. It was still purring when she woke up.
* * *
The Monday morning after the quarry, Leigh had packed a bag straight away. Hip flask. Jumpers. Swiss Army knife. She was paring things back. The knife was a gift from her ex. He had sent it in the post with no explanation a year after they split up. It had her name carved into the handle, in cursive script. Leigh slung the lot over her shoulder and let the cat out of the back door to fend for himself in other gardens, and walked out, clenching her face against the drizzle.
She walked to Bamford and the crossroads, the place where lorries trundled past to Manchester. After an hour, she started to feel like a tree. Her thumb was heavy. After two hours she was picked up by a tyre delivery man called Moonlight Barry who was shipping a load over the Snake Pass. Barry never explained the Moonlight part. He ate a whole tub of Jaffa Cakes and asked her detailed questions about her job. He started every sentence with The thing is, Dee. They were crawling past Ladybower Quarry.
‘I crashed my car last night,’ Leigh said, flatly. ‘After my friend fell off a route, in there.’
‘The thing is, Dee, a new car doesn’t come cheap,’ said Barry.
‘It was a piece of shit anyway.’
Barry had been a champion cyclist in his day. Everyone was a champion at something, he reckoned. Or could be. He flipped a Jaffa Cake in the air and caught it with his mouth.
‘I don’t miss it,’ he said, ‘not the early mornings.’
He ate three Jaffa Cakes in one go. His T-shirt kept riding up over his stomach and he was taking the bends too fast. The road doubled back over itself the further they got from Sheffield, as if it had forgotten something. Somewhere past Peak Forest, she stopped talking to him.
It had turned out Barry was only going as far as Glossop. She scrambled out of the van and started to walk in the rain. Barry beeped and gave her a thumbs up as he revved away. The street was too busy for a weekday and she felt lost. She saw a man wearing three hats – two woolly ones and one flat cap – one on top of the other. A woman walking a cat on a kind of string leash. Two executives in pencil skirts, moving with the same tightly bound steps. She went into the nearest pub and had a lukewarm half, then she walked back out into the day and, after a moment’s hesitation, stood at the side of the street that said BUSES TO SHEFFIELD. She would go to the hospital. She had the name of Caron’s ward scribbled on her hand. She owed it to her.
Instead, she got back home and went out. The Leadmill was all jostling and pushing under green lights, the whole room bobbing to something by The Pixies and she didn’t know why she kept thinking back to The Last Village and all the other places she’d ever lived and why that same train of thought swerved with every new track the DJ put on.
Leigh was sober and she was on her own and that made her unique. She worked here for a summer years ago and still recognised some of the harassed bar staff, the tall guy with dreadlocks and thick eyebrows who was trying to explain to a fifteen-year-old that he couldn’t serve her without ID. The girl was wearing toothpick heels and a white mini skirt. She stood out amongst the students in their plain vest tops and Converse and unbrushed hair.
She could have called Tom tonight. She could have gone home. But she wanted to be in a club, to be too warm, to overhear other people’s conversations and pretend she was in a crap film about Sheffield, the kind you’d make on a hand-held camera and zoom up too close to people’s faces, get shots of the bouncers flicking you the Vs.
A sweaty man with a sculpted beard shimmied over to her, leaned in and asked her if she wanted to buy any pills. She thought about getting off her head. But she might wind up knackered and emotional, thinking about Caron’s crumpled shape and the stretcher and the journey to the hospital. The drive back, the swerve into darkness by the bridge, her matchbox car folding in on itself. She needed to be clear. The strobe lights were tripping her out enough anyway. It was as if each flash froze the dance floor for a second, captured everyone mid-gurn and mid-drink and mid-grope.
She didn’t recognise the man with the close-shaved head and stubble at first, just became aware of the heat of him as he danced in her part of the room, the old baccy-and-lime juice smell. Then she saw he was looking at her. Not just looking, staring her down. She glanced around, but she was hemmed in.
‘You’ve got a fucking nerve.’
‘I know you, don’t I?’
The song was some kind of high-pitched electronica and they had to lean in to each other.
‘It’s Leyton. Need me to jog your memory?’
She shook her head.
‘Leyton, I – ’
‘I reckon Caron might appreciate some visitors. It was you, wasn’t it? You she was with?’
Leigh wanted to defend herself, to say she’d almost gone to the hospital today, but she knew almost wasn’t good enough. She just nodded.
‘Of course it was,’ he said.
‘It wasn’t my fault she fell.’
She could feel his breath against her ear now. ‘Sort yourself out. Someone’s going to get hurt.’
Leigh pushed her way towards the door.
Derwent
This is the drowned world. You think you want to touch me, but you don’t. Under the water, the flooded village exists only as a blueprint, a patterning of silt, thick over the remains of what once stood. Where the Derwent Valley joins the Snake Valley there’s engine noise and birdsong, signs of the living, cars driving west over the Snake Pass to blind bends and bad weather. You aren’t allowed to swim here. You aren’t allowed to hold your nose and duck your head under the surface. Below, there
’s nothing like Atlantis. No skeletal architecture. No lingering church spire, no rusted bell. No school, no sawmill, no bodies cut adrift from the churchyard when the flooding began. No ghostly hymns, no spectral fish. Nothing to dive and reach towards. Just the end of flooding, the dredged aftermath, the settled ground. Thin weeds that brush you. A cold current and a warmer one. The memory of footfall.
Leigh
Next day Leigh did nothing. She stayed in a café near the Peace Gardens all afternoon, nursing an empty cup. When she dragged herself home, Pete was sitting in her garden with a bottle of cheap whisky in one hand and a camera in the other. He took a picture of Leigh as she walked up the path.
‘That won’t come out well,’ he said.
As Leigh opened the back door, the woman from the next cottage twitched her curtains, then darted back into the room. She was middle aged, kept her hands busy, bolted her windows shut. She didn’t think much of Leigh and her visitors.
‘Where you been?’ Pete asked casually. ‘I came round yesterday.’
‘Needed to get away.’
‘I’m only asking to be polite.’
‘You’re never polite.’
The living room was musty. A faint scent of bark and chalk. Was this what she smelled like?
‘It was a good party. Good do. Just like Stretch to spoil it, though.’ He laughed a hoarse laugh.
‘Sit down.’
Pete sat on her climbing rucksack instead of a chair. She’d slung it by the fireplace the day of Caron’s fall. He poured two large whiskies into old mugs.
‘To Stretcher. Rest in peace.’
Leigh downed hers in one. Overtones of malt vinegar and lighter fluid. Pete refilled the glasses.