by Tom Cox
Big sheets of black rolled in from the Atlantic, casting shadows over the water and the orthodontic pewter cliffs, then quickly got changed and replaced with cleaner, brighter sheets. Alice led the way, charging up and down the steep natural staircases in the rock, bellowing greetings to a party of passing surfers who were carrying their boards to the beach. Helen’s mum was a little thinner, a little greyer around the eyes, but if you overlooked that, it was as if the tough winter had never happened. Helen struggled to keep up. This walk, which they had done before, always felt a little like being inside a washer-dryer for its full cycle; a budget model, whose drying function was slightly suspect. June was different here: there were hailstones, but also fierce sun and warm salt wind.
‘So he’s not really said he’s your boyfriend?’
‘He’s not said much. He just listens to me and wants to walk everywhere. And I mean everywhere.’
‘Well, he sounds just delicious. If only I could find a beautiful tall man who wanted to hear what I have to say.’
Alice had actually dated too, until a couple of years ago. When you were sixty-three, you expected plenty of baggage, but all too often, even on top of that, you found an extra storage room out the back for left luggage. The fantasist with the fake military career and the secret wife. The con man with the prison record. Helen did not ask Alice about her more recent love life. The main thing was that she seemed well, and, despite its lack of romantic prospects, life overlooking this serrated headland suited her. She had moved to a city just after Helen left home and felt out of place, like a strand of lichen blowing around a smoky pool hall, then moved back. Alice’s current house felt as much like home to Helen as anywhere, even though it had never been home. Reaching the top of the cliff, the two of them could just make out the rooftops of the village where they’d both lived until Helen was six, much of that time with Helen’s dad. The house over there was just smudgy memories now, memories of memories: the stepping stones over the small creek to the rear, a model of the village that Helen’s dad had made for her from papier mâché, the old empty cottage up the hill with its thick, knobbled walls, a well she’d been obsessively warned by Alice not to venture close to on small solo adventures, which Alice encouraged. Alice told Helen she’d been a child boundlessly happy in her own company; the last of a generation who still went to the woods alone. But Helen had only the dimmest recollection of that version of herself. Her abiding memory of childhood was at school in the town, inland from there: roles in plays, countless friends, the excitement of the day everyone arrived at school and found games painted on the concrete playground in bright colours. Had there been a maypole, or was that historical transference: a children’s TV show she was thinking of from the time? No. There was actually a maypole.
Before Alice and Helen turned inland across a field, unusually boggy for June, a dog emerged from a farm and joined them. Helen didn’t know what kind of dog it was. She assumed it was one of those ones that are just a dog. After a mile, the dog transferred to another party coming the other way, a man in a black cagoule and a woman in a red cagoule. Almost all the walking couples here wore gender-specific anoraks of this combination. They’d almost reached an isolated hilltop church and a lone black figure walked the washed-out path to it, creating a scene that appeared monochrome even though it wasn’t. Dusk had calmed the weather: there were no more black sheets arriving from the sky above the water.
Alice admitted she’d been worried about Helen earlier in the year. Alice had been worried about her? Yes. She had not seemed herself, not very present. It was true that Helen now barely recognised her winter self: it was as foreign to her as Alice’s, on that hospital bed. Her view of breakdowns had been very different when she was younger: a vision of a person physically collapsing, making undignified noises, surrounded by tissues. But it was perhaps possible to have a breakdown without actually knowing it, due to the way time had fortified you to cope with it. Helen felt a lack of answers in her life but was much more centred now; a feeling of panic at the edge of everything had gone. On top of that, this place made her another, different person. It was the air, which was full of risk, but more alive than the air where she lived. But the chilly nights took you unaware; the wind that was trapped by the steep hills didn’t jab at your ribs like an early spring Fenland wind, but it still got in the big old houses beyond the cliffs on the colder summer nights. When they got home Alice lit a fire and thrashed Helen at Scrabble, like always.
Back in the city, Helen left a couple of messages for Peter but received no response, via voice or text. On Tuesday a man with a beard so thick it gave a slight impression that he was just some eyes and a mouth visited the museum and, upon leaving, asked Helen for directions to a gallery in the centre of town. As she began to give them, the man rootled around for a pen in an overfull parka coat pocket. She noticed that one of the objects he pulled out of the pocket was a smartphone, which made her wonder why he hadn’t just looked up the gallery on that, but she was too polite to point it out. He also pulled out a large, smooth stone with a hole in the centre. ‘Nice hagstone,’ said Helen.
Three hours later, just before the museum closed, when Helen was moving an old bawdy pub sign from an alcohol-themed display to storage, the man returned, shyly handed her a folded slip of lined notepaper, and left. Marge, who was working on reception, was around, so Helen didn’t open the piece of paper until ten minutes later, when she was in the toilet.
You are very beautiful, it read. But I don’t like to put people on the spot or invade their space. So please feel free to tear this up and never think of it again. But if you would be amenable to it, I’d very much like to buy you a drink. Rob. Beneath this a telephone number was written.
On Wednesday, Helen arrived home to find Peter leaning against the wall, waiting for her. He looked greyer than usual, darkened in the joins of his face. His hands were hidden deep inside his coat sleeves, giving him the appearance of a brittle plant you might wrap in old cloth to protect it from a hard frost.
‘Hi. I’ve been worried about you. I tried to call, lots of times.’
‘I’m sorry. I thought you might have. I’ve not been well. And I’ve got a problem with my phone company. I hoped you’d be home on time today. But I would have waited. It’s a nice day.’
‘What kind of not well?’
‘I don’t know. I think I ate things.’
She invited him in and, for the first time, he accepted. She offered him a tour of the house and he surveyed the rooms blankly, uncritically. Then they stepped out into the garden, where Tania was playing on the rope swing. The rope swing had been attached to an ash tree by the house’s previous owners and was in the rear of the garden, where there was a gap in the fence, leading to next door, where Tania, who was seven, lived with her parents, Nick and Zoe. Helen liked Nick and Zoe, so had not felt any pressing need to repair the gap in the fence. Tania often came through it to play on the swing, and to tell Helen about the book she was writing, which she said was about an owl who was friends with a fridge. She introduced Tania to Peter but, in an unusually sullen mood, Tania didn’t say hello, and gave him a long, sceptical stare. Helen sensed in Peter a keenness to be back indoors.
Helen did not have a lot of food in, but managed to cobble together a curry for Peter and herself from some green beans, potatoes and cauliflower. He sat apologetically on the corner of an armchair, with the plate on his knee, and picked at the meal like an endangered bird, nervous of impending extinction.
‘How was Cornwall?’
‘Wet, but good.’
‘I like that bit.’
‘Which bit?’
‘Well, all of it. It’s nice.’
‘Have you been off work?’
‘Yes. But I didn’t have many jobs this week, so it was OK. I don’t like work.’
‘Who does, I suppose? It’s like nothing when we’re young prepares us for how much time it is sucking away from our lives. I can’t complain. My job isn’t all that
taxing most of the time.’
‘Mmmm,’ said Peter, noncommittal.
Helen poured a glass of red wine and offered one to Peter, purely out of politeness. He surprised her by accepting, then draining the glass in one, while pulling a wincing, vinegary face. She poured him another, smaller one and he did the same. He had told her he liked jazz, or maybe he hadn’t told her that, but she did remember that when they’d been in a café in the city centre the other week, he’d seemed to perk up and tune in when Jimmy Smith’s version of the Peter & the Wolf soundtrack had come on. Now she chose a Milt Jackson live album from 1965, nothing too far out. Peter didn’t seem to notice it. He really did look unwell.
‘Are you OK?’
‘Fine.’ At this precise moment the doorbell rang and Peter sprang up, immediately losing his balance and crashing into the sideboard then tripping on his own tangled legs and hitting the floor, twisting awkwardly at the ankle as he did.
‘Oh my God! Are you hurt?’
‘No,’ slurred Peter. ‘I don’t know.’
Reluctantly, Helen left him on the floor and went to find out who was at the door. It was Rebecca, who had some flyers for her new local history class, which she was wondering if she could give to Helen to take to the museum and leave in the foyer. Helen didn’t extend an invite to step beyond the threshold to Rebecca, a caring person who could not resist finding a degree of entertainment in the problems of others. Back when Helen felt beset by romantic frustration, at the end of last year, Rebecca had often lent an ear but had soon begun to make Helen feel like a walking soap opera. Helen had withdrawn from Rebecca as a friend since then, just as she now withdrew back into the house, alone: slowly, with as little drama as possible. It took around six minutes in total and in that time Peter had fallen into what appeared to be a deep sleep on the floor. He looked very peaceful, although his legs retained some of the ungainly twist of his descent. She gently rocked his shoulder and he half opened his eyes, mumbled. Nothing intelligible. One word sounded a little like ‘lost’, but Helen couldn’t be sure.
She managed to return Peter to an upright position and encouraged him to ascend the stairs in a half-crawling way, offering a shoulder for support. She led him into her bedroom and he face-planted into the mattress, which made it difficult for her to get the duvet over him. She had experience of men using drunkenness or feigned drunkenness as a ploy to try to stay the night, but she felt sure that was not the case here, even though she was equally sure Peter couldn’t be that drunk. After all, he had only had a glass and a half of wine. She returned to the living room, checked some emails, drank another glass of wine, watched the second half of a film she’d started watching the other day, a dank tale of a psychotic preacher stalking children through a noir landscape.
She went back to check on Peter twice during this time and he was comatose but breathing steadily. Despite her having lived here for almost nine months, the spare bedroom remained a small city of unpacked boxes, and the fairly high-grade airbed she owned was trapped behind several of them. She didn’t much fancy sleeping on the sofa, so at around 11 p.m. she crept under the covers beside Peter, sticking to her usual side of the bed, but maybe a little more so than usual. He did not stir.
Helen dreamed that Tania was on the rope swing again and Helen was watching her, annoyed at not being able to have a go. But when she finally took over she realised that the rope swing wasn’t here in the city, it was in a much more rural place. As she swung higher, she could just about see the stepping stones behind the house on the coast where she used to live with her mum. The rope swing was getting really high now, and spiky branches prodded her head and it began to bleed, but she kept going higher, in an attempt to get a better view of the stones, even though the blood was running down her forehead beginning to get into her eyes.
‘I missed you so much.’
Helen opened her eyes and could see from a crack in the curtains that was letting in the first light of dawn that Peter was sitting on the end of the bed. His face was turned away from her.
‘I was only gone for eight days.’
‘I mean before that.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘I knew you wouldn’t.’
‘Now I’m confused. How is your head? You don’t normally drink. I was worried about you.’
‘I don’t like wine. I only had it once before. I don’t like the taste. Or of beer, either. I knew you wouldn’t remember.’
‘Remember what?’
‘We used to be friends. A long time ago. You said we’d always be friends. I missed you so much.’
‘I’m confused.’
‘You said we’d always be friends. It was a promise. I knew you wouldn’t keep it. It was by the stream. I took so long to find you.’
‘Peter, you’re scaring me a bit now.’
‘We used to walk really far together. One time we found an old factory. It was a long way away and my mum would have been angry if she’d known. Nobody was there, but there were shoes. They were very old. You tried some on. I saw you every day, then you were gone. I didn’t get big for a long time and then I did. I looked for a long time before I found you. I came here and I watched for a while. I wanted to make sure it was you.’
‘OK, Peter, I need you to leave now.’
He stood and she was once again reminded of his baffling, incongruous height. She remained frozen beneath the covers while he walked across the room. As he opened the door to the landing, light streamed in from the big curtainless sash window out there, illuminating his face, and she could see tears on it.
‘I just wanted to know you were OK,’ he said.
She did not move until she’d heard the front door click shut. About a minute after that, she permitted herself a glance through the curtains. About a hundred yards away, through a light morning mist that the sun was already eviscerating, she could see him making his way to the end of the street, hands deep in his sleeves, then turn and open the driver’s door of the dark blue Japanese off-road vehicle.
‘I’m done,’ said Donna Rooney. ‘Knobheads, needy freaks, players, liars, stalkers, big babies, the lot of them.’
‘Except the good ones,’ said Alice, through a cough. ‘But they’re usually hiding something.’
The two of them and Helen were in a café on the east side of the city. Three weekends earlier, Mark had dropped the bombshell that over the last six months he had been having an affair with a mature Spanish student of his, with whom he would imminently be moving into a flat in London. This had prompted Helen to reconnect with Donna, but largely as a listener. Helen had said little about Peter to Donna or her mum. As they knew it, she had simply got briefly involved with ‘a weird guy’, who had seemed OK at first but had become a bit too obsessive. It was entertaining to hear the two of them rant about the opposite sex, becoming a double act of sorts, after which – contradicting much of what she’d just said – Donna departed for a pub on the east side of the city, where she was due to meet her date for the evening.
Helen and Alice continued along the river, in no rush to get anywhere in particular. When they reached the university and the crowds thickened, the volume of people appeared to tire Alice out. Helen noticed how much smaller she appeared here, so much less indomitable than on those cliffs near her house. Human character was more subject to geography than was generally acknowledged. Yet there was a pressure to be the same person people had come to expect everywhere you went. It was one of the small, untold difficulties of life.
The summer had got sluggish and dusty around the edges. Helen continued to feel very present in her life, largely avoided the noise of the internet, but meditated nowhere near as much as she intended to. She justified this by deciding that she was in a residual state of mindfulness, carried over from the class in spring. She tidied the garden and told herself that was meditation, since, as she’d been told, there was no right way to meditate. It was about making your own rules. To further suppress a more general feeling of untidi
ness in the air, she’d finally got around to properly organising the spare room a couple of weeks ago, in anticipation of Alice’s stay. In a drawer stuffed with receipts, she’d found a piece of lined A5 and unfolded it to reveal the note from Rob, the man who’d come to the museum, who she now remembered as two kind eyes poking out of some coarse dark hair. In an impulsive but philosophical mood, hugely aware that two months can be a very long time, she called the number on the piece of paper, and the two of them arranged to meet. They got on effortlessly, and met again. She was surprised to discover that underneath all that beard he was six years younger than her, often speaking eagerly about concepts and experiences she’d been through and out the other side of, with a naivety that was at once charming and a little irritating. In other ways he appeared older than he was. He knew a lot about fossils and followed The Archers obsessively. He co-ran a homeless shelter. He confessed that on the worst days it made him want to walk through his front door at night and collapse on his flat’s cold floorboards.
Helen continued to be mildly stimulated by her job and the night classes and cinemas and drinking holes of the city, but she had recently begun to feel something drawing her away from it, in the direction from which she had once come – just a little tug on a sleeve at first, then more. It was heightened by five days in Alice’s company. She saw sky in Alice’s eyes, a different kind of weather in her cheeks. In her dreams, Helen continued to visit the rope swing on the tree, and the stepping stones. She no longer cut her head on branches as she swung. Other images that came to her made her wake feeling even more sure she was revisiting a version of the countryside surrounding that first house that she, Alice and her dad had lived in. The recesses of a steep space between cliffs. Trees growing almost perpendicular to the mulchy ground. The house higher up the slope and the well behind it. She would often emerge from the dreams feeling a very strong sense that someone had been holding her hand. In one dream she saw Peter waiting for her behind an old stile that had been chewed to a smooth curved edge by horses. Some of the footpaths were streams.