by Sarah Moss
She’s over at the window again. Did you see the baby out earlier with his big sister and his dad, she says, he’s so cute, he’s just learning to walk, you know that stage when it’s basically just not quite falling over? And they have this amazing confidence or drive or something, to keep getting up and trying again? When do we lose that, do you think, where does it go? He tries to remember if he’s ever seen a baby learning to walk. I suppose they have to, he says, evolution wouldn’t favour someone who fell over and just packed in the whole walking idea. Mothers would, though, she says. You wouldn’t just leave your baby lying there for the next woolly mammoth. I don’t think woolly mammoths eat babies, he says, wondering what on earth they’re talking about. She wanders across the room, picks up one of Mum’s china swan ornaments from the sideboard, turns it over. Just put your coat on and go for a walk, he thinks. Borrow a kayak. Do some of your yoga. He likes watching her do yoga, the seriousness of her face, the way she moves. You can tell she used to dance. She puts the swan down and goes back to the window. It’s still not getting dark out there. Do you think everyone else is looking out of their windows too, she says, do you think we’re all watching the rain? He stirs his veg, adds the garlic – took him years to learn not to put it in until the other stuff’s nearly cooked – hopes a tin of the good Italian tomatoes will save the day. Maybe they’re all having sex, he says, maybe they’re all taking excellent drugs. Before the party. Sit down, he says, put your feet up, let me bring you some of those nuts and your magazine. I’ve hardly had my feet down today, she says, tomorrow we’ll go out, yes, whatever the weather? Sure, he says, of course, we need food anyway. Tomorrow, I promise. And they will, he thinks, drive down past the scattered houses to the village but she’ll want to go on to the town where the trains bring the scent of the city, and where there’s a proper supermarket whose strip lighting will shine on the tenderness of these last few days and erase it, whose shoppers will notice the lift of her hair and the shape of her in her jeans and her amazing eyelashes. Which is all fine, of course, they can’t hide here for ever, he knows that. He does.
flights begin
Bats rouse earlier on these grey days. All day they have been hanging from the rafters of the old barn like pears on a tree. The first one flaps into wakefulness and then there’s an outbreak of life, an explosion of fluttering. Utterances too high for human hearing pierce the air, bounce off the old stone walls and the undersides of the slate roof. Flights begin, fast as falling, but as the bats start to trickle out into the dimming sky, their high notes are returned by raindrops. Midges will blossom when the rain stops. Moths will turn to the moon when the clouds clear, but for now, there is nothing to eat.
shadow people
IZZIE CAN’T SLEEP. Daddy came and said good night to her hours and hours ago and then she heard them putting Pat to bed, which isn’t fair because he’s four and a half years younger than her. Mum sang the song she used to sing for Izzie, hó-bhan, hó-bhan, Goiridh òg O, I lost my darling baby-o. I saw the trace of the swan on the lake, but not a sign of baby-o. But Mum didn’t add Izzie’s special verse about finding the darling baby-o which means that in Izzie’s mind and maybe in Pat’s dreams the baby is still lost, lying out there beyond the track of the wee brown otter and the mountain mist. There’s still talking through the wall but it’s starting to get dark outside and soon they’ll go to bed too and Izzie will be the only person awake, the only one to know if a bad thing happens, and it almost is a bad thing, when the grown-ups go to sleep, especially with the doors shut. She didn’t mind at first, when it was still light. I’m just closing it so we don’t disturb you, Daddy said, sleep tight, be bright, night night gorgeous girl.
Izzie pushes back the duvet, which is too hot anyway, kneels up on the bed and unhooks the cord for the blind. You can’t leave cords dangling because babies put their heads through them and die, but Izzie knows how to undo it and wind it back up again so that if Pat comes in here and somehow gets onto her bed he can’t die, or at least not from the cord although he could still fall off and bang his head. Babies have big heads and weak necks so you have to be very careful with a baby’s head. She tries the wrong cord first, makes the blind tilt instead, and then pulls gently and steadily so it slides up, and the strips rattle a little but with the door closed Mummy and Daddy won’t hear. She doesn’t want it too far up, not so that someone outside would think it was open, or see her looking out, because there are people outside. There’s the big girl from the cabin next door who stays up much later than Izzie, a girl who’s allowed to scuffle about on her pink bike with streamers some days until it’s properly dark and sometimes she sees Izzie and waves and smiles, but she probably won’t be out in this rain. But there’s someone else, in the woods, someone who comes most days and stands in the shadows at dusk. He sometimes seems to look this way but Izzie always ducks and she doesn’t think he’s seen her.
She sits back on her heels and rests her chin on her hands on the windowsill, so that her eyes are level with the opening. He’s not there yet. She can’t remember, does he maybe not come in the rain? Or is he sheltering, under the trees? She puts her eyes right up to the window, presses her forehead against it. The raindrops go blurry and she blinks. There’s mist on the window now and she draws a flower on it with her finger, four big petals and then a little one because she’s run out of room. When she’s bigger she wants a pink bike with streamers. She wants shiny patent shoes and white lacy tights like that girl. She puts her fingertip against a new raindrop and traces its path down the glass. Raindrops don’t go straight down, ever. They go round each other sometimes, like magnets that won’t touch. Another one. She tries to do two at once, with the forefingers of each hand, but you can’t watch them well enough to get it right. One at a time. He’s still not there, the tree man.
Izzie folds her fingers the way Granny showed her. Here is a church, here is a steeple, open the doors, here are the people. She doesn’t think she’s been in a church, but there is one, with a steeple, by the bus stop at home. Suddenly she needs to be there, at home, with her butterfly wallpaper and pink curtains, in her own bed with all her toys and knowing that Maddie upstairs is in her bed on the other side of the ceiling. She doesn’t like it here at night, there are no streetlights to come on and if she wakes up later it will be thick, woolly dark, the sort of dark that fills up your mouth when you open it so you can’t call out as well as not being able to see, so that whatever came at you with bony fingers there would be nothing you could do – Izzie wants to get out of bed and go find Daddy, but now she’s scared to move because of the dark place under the bed which is exactly the right size for a crawling snatching thing with long arms, like a giant spider, scuttling, but with pincers. She tips over and squirms under the duvet and curls up small with it over her head, but it’s still not her own bed or her own duvet and she has only Elsie Bear to hold because Mummy left all the others at home, and what if there’s a fire or burglars there while they’re away, what if all her bed toys are being stuffed into a sack and taken away so they’ll never see her again, or if they’re burning, if their whole flat is burning, and Maddie’s flat too because they’re joined together? What if Maddie’s burning? There’s no air under this duvet.
Izzie comes up. It’s darker than it was, dusk gathering by the door and under the dressing table and especially in the mirror. She tries to look away from the mirror. There isn’t one in her room at home and she hadn’t realised that they’re scary, especially in the dark, that things seem to move in them. She keeps forgetting that the mirror isn’t a window, that there isn’t another room on the other side of it, another dark room with another door through which shadow people could come, all the dead people who live underground. She looks at the real window, where light is now reaching in through her peephole, but she doesn’t feel safe turning her back to the room and the mirror-room to see out. How can you be sure, in the dark, which is the window and which the mirror? He’s probably there now, the tree man, in one
or the other. She hears Mummy laughing in the living room, and then Daddy’s voice, and that gives her courage to sit up and wrap the duvet firmly around her shoulders and kneel again at the window, offer the back of her head to the mirror. It’s still raining and the clouds are a funny colour, but there’s enough light yet for Izzie to see the shadow cast from the kitchen window, where the grown-ups have the light on now, and to see across the fading grass to the nearest trees.
There is someone moving, someone coming round the house, too close, creeping, but just while Izzie’s trying to find her voice to call Daddy the figure goes past and turns into the red boat boy’s sister, wearing the red boat boy’s top with the hood up and her hair hanging over her face, and while Izzie’s watching she goes round the back of her own cabin and kind of scrabbles at the wall and then she’s in through the window and Izzie’s wondering if that counts as a burglar, if someone’s breaking in to her own house, though she didn’t break anything. She watches while the light comes on, a square of light making a square of bright raindrops in the dark, and then she remembers to look for the tree man.
She was right, he is there, in the trees. Just standing, watching.
From out of sight, the music begins to play.
maybe they dream
The trees change shape at night. In the darkness, limbs relax, leaves droop. Branches reach out for each other, like holding hands. It’s tiring, raising boughs to the sun, making energy of sunlight. Come night the trees’ bodies have less work. The pressure in their cells falls a little, like ours. Like us, like any creature, they don’t stop at night. Some tree-mind keeps the respiration running, tends the flow of sap. Some green thought reads the turning of the earth and the slow tilt towards winter.
The woods expand, settle down for the night, offer a little more shelter to those who need it. Trees sleep, more or less. Maybe some nights they dream and wake, check the darkness, sleep again till dawn.
a woman sitting on the edge
HE’S NOT BEING racist. Even though they weren’t meant to be here any more, it’s no odds to him that they’re foreign, Romanian or what have you. He’d feel just the same about a bunch of lads from Stockport, and in fact he did feel the same and said so, that time they went to Scarborough and there was a stag party in the upstairs flat, and he doesn’t see why just because this lot is Bulgarian or whatever he should treat them any differently. It’s not OK, is it, keeping dozens of people up all night, they should have some consideration, there are young families here and old folk not to mention Justine was up at silly o’clock running, her own choice maybe but she doesn’t ruin everyone else’s sleep just because she likes to be up at unsocial hours. Live and let live, that’s what Steve thinks. They can stay up all night and deafen themselves if they want to but they should do it somewhere else, such as back where they came from. A holiday park in the middle of the summer break, for Pete’s sake.
He can feel the bass coming through the ground, echoing around the crawl space between the earth and the floorboards, vibrating in his bones. Christ, he says, someone should really say something to that lot. Justine sighs, pauses whatever she’s watching on her laptop and takes out an earbud. On the screen, he can see a woman frozen with her red lipsticked mouth open and a glass of wine in midair. He wishes he’d thought to download something of his own to watch. What, she says. I said, he says, someone should say something. About that racket. We can’t have it going on all bloody night again, it’s ruining the whole bloody holiday, everyone shattered all the time. Yeah, she says, it is a bit loud, and she puts her earbud back and presses play.
He pushes himself up out of his chair – she’s not wrong, Justine, he should do more exercise – and goes to tell the boys it’s OK, he’s going to deal with it, they’ll get their sleep, but when he pushes their door open over the weird thick carpet, they both seem to be asleep, or at least are lying motionless in the darkening room although the sound – almost more like force than sound, something you feel in your bones more than your ears – is pulsing through the windows and the wooden walls. Is the music bothering you, he whispers, I’ll go make them turn it down. Noah turns over and looks at him, confused. What, he says, I was nearly asleep. Shh, says Steve, go back to sleep then, I was just worried that music would keep you up. Oh, says Noah, no Dad, it’s all right, and he lies down again.
Steve goes into the bathroom to see how loud it is there. Loud, is the answer. He thinks the bass is making ripples in the water in the toilet bowl, echoing in the empty bathtub. His head is starting to ache, a hard weight in the base of his skull. He rubs his neck, catches sight of the movement in the mirror over the basin. It feels as if there’s one of those round stones from the beach lodged in there, and his reflection looks pale, uneasy, the face of a man who didn’t expect to be caught. Maybe it’s a brain tumour, don’t they start with headaches? Maybe he’s going to die, maybe that’s why he’s been so tired recently, not, as Justine likes to imply, too many bacon sarnies and not enough running but a tragic disease striking him down in his prime. Well, prime might be pushing it. You probably don’t notice when you’re in your prime, do you; in fact, if you’re thinking about your prime it’s almost certainly over. He catches his eye again. Mirrors are weird in the dark, everyone knows that. He picks up the bathmat which the boys have left damp on the floor, hangs it over the towel rail, flushes the loo which for some reason Eddie doesn’t, ever. The song changes, something faster with yipping and caterwauling pouring through the trees and still that bass like a boy bouncing a ball against the wall. It must be going right out over the water, the fish in the loch must be hearing it, scaring birds out of their nests and probably even keeping the damn sheep awake. Don’t sheep lose their lambs if they get distressed? He’d be doing something for the local farmers, too, if he went round there and told those Bulgarians what’s what.
He goes back down the hall to the kitchen. He fills the kettle in the dusk; you can still see what you’re doing, just about. Justine’s face glows in the dim room, up-lit by her screen. He’s not the only one starting to show his age, all the running and yoga in the world won’t undo the way her neck and chin are beginning to droop or the scribbled lines suddenly marked under her eyes. We’re halfway through, he thinks, not a new thought, exactly, a man knows when he turns forty, but he hasn’t really thought about Justine ageing before, that one day she might be holding on to his arm the way her mum does, will want him to carry the bags and do all the driving. Will she? Her mum’s always been a bit like that, a bit lame, though she’s a good cook, better than Justine, and keeps a cleaner house. Justine’s probably still going to be lifting weights in her nineties, isn’t she, years past the point where normal people have decided they’ve already beaten the odds and can eat all the pies and drink all the beer they can lift because they’re not going to ask your bloody cancer risk at the golden gates, are they? Maybe it won’t be so bad, ageing. He drops a couple of teabags into the pot. The thing is, it’s all downhill from here, which is a daft thing to say because it’s not as if people in their thirties are getting younger either, look at it that way and it’s all downhill from birth, death approaching minute by passing minute, kids too, but he knows what he means. It’s different, being past the midpoint. It just is. The young are younger and the older not so old.
He pours the boiling water, watching the steam rise and drift on the darkening air. He glances up again at his wife, who is biting the skin off the sides of her fingernails, grim- acing and baring her teeth as if he isn’t even here. Even with the earbuds, she must be able to hear the noise, must know that someone has decided that everyone within about a three-mile radius is just going to have to listen to their racket, that one Romanian gets to decide what every other soul has to hear for hours and hours of the night, that one person’s urge to party trumps everyone else’s need to sleep. He’ll go round there, he thinks, and kill them with his bare hands, he’ll kick the door in, he’ll rip the speakers from the wall and throw them through the bloody
windows, that’s what he’ll do. And then there will be peace.
Do you want a cup of tea, he says to Justine, but she’s too busy with her box set and her fingernails to respond. He goes over and taps her shoulder: on screen, there’s a woman sitting on the edge of a shiny kitchen counter in a puffy red dress with her white knees wide open, bracing her arms behind her while a man in a suit appears to be giving her oral sex under the skirt. Justine pauses it again and takes out an earbud. Now what, she says. I said, he says, do you want a cup of tea. No thanks, she says, and she waits, frowning, until he’s back in the kitchen before she restarts the action. What the hell is she watching? It’s typical, isn’t it, when a man watches porn he’s dirty and dangerous and it’s degrading to women but she can just sit there on the sofa for all the world to see, getting all hot and bothered over her laptop. Her work laptop, he might add, property of her employer. She could get sacked for that and then where’d they be, not as if they could manage on what he earns, not these days. The song’s changed again, a surging, rolling beat against an angry male voice. You can’t really hear the words but he’d bet good money they’re not what you’d want your kids to say. Do they have rap in Poland? He pours himself tea, takes the last of the milk which means there won’t be any for breakfast not that there was enough anyway, adds two heaped spoons of sugar and leaves the spoon on the counter, sticky. Is that what she wants, to sit on the counter like that? Is that what he needs to do to get some action these days? How does it even work, how could you get your mouth where it needs to be if she’s parked her backside on a hard surface, wouldn’t your chin get in the way? It doesn’t make sense, fucking American films with their acres of kitchen and fridges the size of cars. They probably have a special counter insert for the purpose, along with their ice- dispensers and garbage-disposal units and what have you. Who wears a big dress like that in real life anyway, especially in the kitchen? Oh fucking hell, they’ve just turned the music up even louder. There ought to be built-in limits on those things, like the speed limiters on goods vehicles, not that people wouldn’t find a way to disable them. Bloody Bulgarians.