‘You’ve come,’ she said.
The Level Crossing
One two, one two. It’s not hard, it’s not complicated. It’s just a case of putting one foot in front of the other.
Starting out is always tough, though. There’s the stiffness in my calves, and the way my feet feel heavy, flat-soled as if I’m wearing giant clown shoes: slap slap, slap slap. The movement isn’t automatic yet, as running ought to be. It feels deliberate, the lifting and placing, having to think about each step.
I think of how it works with engines, how the oil needs to heat before it liquefies, before its levels rise sufficiently to wash over the moving parts. Until then it’s metal on metal, grating and jarring, unlubricated. It was Matt who told me, while degreasing chain and sprockets on an old newspaper at the kitchen table.
I feel the unoiled grind inside me, ball in socket, bone on bone; I feel my tendons dry as an unrosined bow, more fit to snap than to give and stretch. But then it comes, the rising oil, the rising sap. I hit my stride. The beat establishes control, one two, one two, and it takes me over, drives me. My limbs are pure rhythm. My body working now on instinct, my mind is released for thought.
I’ve done some of my best thinking when I’m out on a run. It’s why I’ve never been one for running with a radio or iPod – that, and the alien tempo of the music, always slightly out of step with my own measure, with the natural cadence of my stride. How often has running made the gearshift, bumped the circuit, freed the logjam: problems unknotted, conundrums solved? When I’m running I can hatch great plans, receive revelations, crack a mystery, write a poem. Or once I could, but recently... but now... Time to think is a knife that cuts two ways.
One two, one two. I focus instead on what I see: on the peace outside, instead of the tangle within. This road is beautiful in the early mornings, in any weather, any season. Today the tarmac under my feet has the silver-grey sheen left behind by an overnight frost, and the ice melt falls in heavy droplets from the hedges on either side of the lane, their patter accentuating the surrounding stillness. The air meets my trachea in round, wet mouthfuls, saturated with the flavours of autumn: leaf mould and mushrooms and the woodsmoke of early chimneys. Over the stubbled fields which slope away towards the river and the railway line, a low, damp mist is gathered, huddling in the dips and hollows like sluggish cattle, while, above, a watery sun gilds everything it touches in a chill lemon-white.
I am one with it all, one with the moist air, the dripping leaves, the palely gleaming morning. No thought – no space for thought. I am smoothly pumping legs. I am swinging arms and warm, resilient, spanking feet. One two, one two.
One two, one two. The frost was sharper last night, or maybe this morning I am earlier by a fraction or the sun more veiled, so that the thaw is less advanced than yesterday. To the left of the band of tarmac, where sunlight falls, the strip of encroaching grey-brown sand is moist on top and yields where I tread, like putty; to the right, in the shadow of the hedge, it is crisply crusted and has no give at all.
One two three four... If I let myself count on, what number would I reach? It never differs, my running route. Through the cottage gate and up the track – close-packed and rutted now but kicking deep with sand in summer – then turn right and out along the lane; right and right again, past the village hall and down the hill; past the turning left to Stone Common and the church, and on towards the level crossing. That’s where I turn, at the level crossing. It’s where I’ve always turned.
It bounded my roamings, marked the confines of my girlhood cycle rides: the forbidden frontier. Forbidden, and thereby of course imbued with fascination. The hurtle of metal, its relentless, smooth-oiled piston power. It still draws my own mechanical strides, engine moving towards engine, each in its own tramlines.
There at the unmanned gates I reach out a hand to tag the gloss-white painted wood – slick to the touch this morning where ice has been – then swing on my heel and retrace my steps, heading for home. Thirty-eight minutes, more or less exactly, my pace unvarying: nineteen minutes there and nineteen minutes back. So, how many steps? If I take three strides a second that’s a hundred and eighty per minute; for thirty-eight minutes, that makes six thousand and... six thousand and... One two, one two.
I always leave at the same time. My alarm, I should say, is set for the same time, always a quarter to seven. But then there are the little variations – the time it takes to down a glass of water; to pull on sweatshirt, leggings, trainers; to tie up laces. I know if I am late or early by the southbound train: the Lowestoft to Ipswich train, due at Wickham Market at 07:14. It passes through the level crossing at, what, 07:09, 07:10? If the signal on the bend is down, it’s gone by already; if the signal’s up, it’s on its way.
Did she see it before it hit her, little Izzie? Great-aunt Izzie, my grandmother’s sister – though there’s something incongruous about the idea an eleven-year-old great-aunt. Was it the Ipswich or the Lowestoft train, I’ve wondered but have nobody to ask. Northbound or south? If northbound it would have been visible for longer, on the open stretch of track between the water meadows. She’d have seen it coming, surely, the child of eleven, on her way to Willett’s Farm with the morning milk pail. Southbound, then – rounding the corner from the direction of Saxmundham, past Willett’s barn and the clump of broad horse chestnuts. Great-aunt Izzie, whose name is my name. Isobel. It was Grannybel’s name, too, but I never knew; in the family my grandmother was always Bel. I never even knew there was a sister at all, not until after Grannybel had died. Not back in the bike ride days – not even then, when Great-aunt Izzie could have been a bogle to scare the children, a cautionary tale, a graphic flesh-and-blood reason to Keep Off the Level Crossing. I only knew about Great-uncle Ted, who died when I was eight but whose whiskery kisses I remember at Christmases – and Grannybel, a decade younger than her brother Teddy and named for a big sister she never met, the pain of whose memory was such that Bel was never Izzie but always Bel.
‘What was she like?’ I asked Mum when I found out, when she was logging the family genealogy, half a dozen years ago. But she didn’t know; she hadn’t asked. ‘They never talked about it.’ And now they’re dead and it’s too late.
The signal’s down; the train has gone. I turn for home.
First one foot and then the other: one two, one two. This morning is wet, but I still go out. I always run, never miss. The rain slants down in oblique grey lines. Like stair rods, Grannybel used to say, but I think more of wires: the colour of zinc, it stings my skin and leaves a ferrous tang on my lips. The first part is the worst. Setting off in the rain in just a cotton sweatshirt feels all wrong; it makes me feel exposed. But once I’m wet, and warm, the two things cancel out and cease to matter. There’s only the rhythm of my moving limbs, my pounding feet. One two.
Family secrets. They never talked about it. But then, nor do we, do we?
The surface of the lane is glazed underfoot where I skirt to avoid the puddles. The ball of one trainer slips away from me by a half-centimetre as the tread makes contact with the road, and I feel my weight pitch sideways for an instant before the forward momentum takes over and I regain equilibrium.
Careful. One two.
The risk of falling and the damage it could do, the catastrophic event it might precipitate. That’s what the books all talk of now, the overbearing, complacent books. That, and the jolting and jarring, the diversion of blood flow from where it’s needed. Before that – before the twelfth week – it was the threat of overheating, of all unlikely things: the raising of my core temperature at peril to formation of the major organs. The bun in the oven, overcooked. Such nonsense, though, it all was – such patronising nonsense. Paternalistic claptrap for pampered Western women, to be coddled and wrapped around in cotton wool with their feet up on a cushion, when throughout most of humanity and for most of history, women have toiled in the fields until the time of their confinement.
What could be more natural than running?
It hardly seems real, in any case – the small invader, the knot of cells, expanding and mutating in my uterus. Sixteen weeks and I’m barely showing, even to myself. If I stand front-on to the mirror and press my palms across my abdomen I can almost believe there’s nothing there. The symptoms, imagined; the test results, a mistake, despite the grainy image from the scan. No one has noticed anything, not even Mum. The decaf, the fruit juice: she seems to think I’m just detoxing.
Maybe I’ll tell her. Maybe today.
You’d think she’d see the signs, when she’s been there twice herself. You’d think she’d recognise it in her own daughter.
If the train hasn’t gone yet when I reach the level crossing, then I’ll tell her. I’ll ring as soon as I get home. Or perhaps I’ll leave it an hour or so; Mum’s never been an early riser.
It’s November now. The lane here, where it runs down the hill towards the river and the railway line between overhanging willows, is thickly smeared with rotting leaves, like goose grease. Mid-November. That’s four or five months to come of winter clothing: long cardigans and baggy jumpers. No one need know, not for a long time.
But I will ring Mum, I will. I can’t do this alone. If the train hasn’t gone when I get there, I’ll ring.
My stride shortens as I start to slacken off, to pull up as I approach the crossing gates. My eyes drift right, towards the chestnut trees and the bend in the track.
It’s down – the signal’s down. I turn for home.
Today the lane is wrapped about by an enveloping mist. It is no longer confined to low-lying places but reaches everywhere, diffusing and refracting the spectral early light. The moisture-laden air distorts sound, appearing to trap and throw it back, causing my rhythmic breathing, my rhythmic footfalls, to echo within my skull. The whole world is muffled and remote. It is almost as if the whole thing – my running feet, the fog, the looming, half-occluded hedges, the clinging passenger in my belly – were all contained inside my head. If I closed my eyes, would I make it disappear?
One two, one two.
Was it foggy, I wonder, when Great-aunt Izzie died? Is that why she didn’t see the train? The branch cut short on the family tree in Mum’s album bore a date in June. But the railway track runs close to the river all the way along, and the valley of the Alde is prone to sudden mists at any time of year. Was there that morning, perhaps, some treacherous concurrence of humidity and temperature which spun to a plume of opaque white the evaporating morning dew? A trail, a wisp – enough to deceive the eye and mask for a fatal second or two the onrush of steam and steel? And at the final moment, did she see it come, did she hear the approaching thunder, the brakes’ metallic squeal? Did she have time to feel it, the impossible mind-stopping breath-blocking weight of impact?
As I run down the hill from the village hall, the fog seems more impenetrable with every step. The turning to Stone Common is almost upon me before I see it, there on the left: the road that leads to Stone Common where the old house is, the house where Great-grandma and Great-grandpa lived with Izzie and Ted, and later with Ted and little Bel. The house they brought her home to, broken, that morning – by cart, perhaps, or carried on a hurdle? And beyond Stone Common up the hill again to St Peter’s church, where they bore her later, shoulder-high and no weight at all, eleven-year-old Izzie in her wooden box.
One two. I can’t make out the crossing gates yet, though I know I must be close.
Matt won’t be coming back. I saw his eyes, that night when I told him – the eyes of the quarry, the hounded fox, already seeing other walls, another bed. ‘I need time,’ he said as he climbed on his motorbike, but the weeks which have stretched to months have shown that it wasn’t time he needed after all. I gave him time – or, rather, I gave him space, and he has clutched it between us like the buffering fog. I could have pleaded with him. I could have – should have? – said the words. I can’t do this alone.
If the train has gone before I reach the level crossing, then he isn’t coming back. I’m almost there. Denser white behind the white, a low rectangle forms itself across my path: the gates. Easing to a halt, I blink away the beads of sweat and fog and peer to my right towards the bend, straining to locate shape amid the indecipherable blank.
I see it. The signal’s down – as if I needed it to tell me what I knew already, what I know. The train has passed. Matt’s gone; he isn’t coming back.
My legs feel leaden as I turn for home.
Frost again this morning: a hard, cold, iron frost. Tarmac is a forbearing surface but today it’s concrete. Every foot I plant jolts up through bone and sinew, slamming joint pads, compressing cartilage, rattling teeth and jaw. I hold myself together tighter against the impact, but it only makes things worse. Everything is taut, everything jars.
If I reach the level crossing before the train comes... But I can’t tell Mum. If she hasn’t noticed, it must be for a reason. She has her own life, her own problems. I’m not a child; I’m twenty-eight years old. I’m not a kid any more to run home for a plaster, for Mum to kiss it better, to make it go away. She has no sticking plaster for this, in any case – I’m on my own.
I can’t do this alone.
If I reach the crossing before the train... Matt isn’t coming back. His phone is always set to voicemail these days. I know he’s screening, pressing the button that shuts me out. He won’t be coming back.
But I can’t, I can’t do this alone.
If I reach the crossing before the train... What did she feel, my namesake, the child with the milk pail who was my great-aunt Izzie? Was there time for fear, for pain?
If I reach the crossing before the train. Nineteen minutes; two thousand seconds, give or take; six thousand paces. How many indrawn breaths, how many remaining exhalations? How many heartbeats left, my own and the smaller flickering pulse inside? Of nineteen minutes, maybe five to go now, or four, or three... If I get there before the train.
If I get there first, I’ll wait for the train. I won’t turn back, I’ll wait by the rail. It would be so easy. So easy.
Down the hill now, beneath the willows: the gates are in sight. My stride is looser: long and loose and slow. I look right, towards the bend in the track.
It’s up – the signal’s up. I’m here first; the train is on its way.
The small pedestrian gate hangs to the left of the main barriers. I lift the wooden latch from its iron cradle, swing back the simple stanchioned bar on its sprung hinges and step through, letting it thud shut behind me. The single track slices the tarmac, twin blades of steel gleaming in the frosty air. So easy. I move forward to stand before the nearest rail. There’s no making sense of it as I stare down: the cold, clean metal in its shallow groove, silver on grey, quite static, a mere geometric pattern of colour and lines. Is this it? Is this all there is? Behind me and to the side, from the corner of my eye I catch the warning red as the light begins to flash. On off, on off. I still stare down.
One step forward is all it will take. Just one.
The sound is dull when it comes, not nearly as loud as I’d imagined. Willett’s barn and the horse chestnuts must mask and dampen it. But I feel the change of pressure, so that its approach is more of a surge of movement than of noise. The train seems to push before it a solid block of air, sucking out oxygen, sucking me forward, sucking me in. It squeezes my lungs, squeezes the air, squeezes time itself: my life and future lives, past lives, concertinaed into one.
One step.
The rail beckons. Breath compresses. Time teeters, I teeter. Just one step.
Then it happens. And when it does, it comes not as enfolding arms nor as a child’s reaching hand – her grasping hand, the other Izzie – but as sudden opposite momentum: a backwards drag, a quiet, compelling force, pulling me back on my heels and away from the rail. I rock, and stagger back. The train roars up and by. Tears blind me.
Then it is gone; the train has gone. The shockwaves subside and the air is still again. Away to my right the signal fal
ls. I am aware that I am cold.
I turn for the gate; I turn for home.
Halfway up the hill, in the shelter of the willow trees, I stop, transfixed. I feel it – I feel her, my daughter. Inside the circle of my womb, I feel her shift and turn. One kick.
No more running now. I lace my fingers close about my belly and inhale the sunlit, ice-edged morning air, my breathing deep and steady. I’ll be all right; we’ll be all right.
I walk towards home. It’s very simple, really. It’s just a case of putting one foot in front of the other.
One
two
three
four
All the Flowers Gone
It was a perfect morning for cycling. The temperature must have fallen during a clear night and a dawn mist had formed over the fields. As Poppy bowled along Tunstall Lane it rose in layers, which seemed to lift and peel away without losing any of their density, and hung just clear of the barley so that sunlight filtered through underneath, tingeing them from below with watery gold. Once through Tunstall village and out on the road that stretched straight ahead into Rendlesham Forest, she rose on her pedals in her battered trainers, pushing down harder with each stroke, enjoying the stretch in her calves and the rush of cool air in her lungs, until the dark trees on either side were no more than a blur.
Perfect for plant-hunting, too, with dew still freshening the leaves, and the flower heads yet to fade and fall.
She locked up her bike by the main gate, still crowned with its scrolls of military barbed wire, and walked across the tarmac towards the cluster of mismatched, low-lying buildings, outlines only against the slant of morning sun. From amid the dazzle there emerged a figure which she had to squint to make out: clad in a blue serge flying jacket, he could have walked straight from any decade of the base’s existence, from the forties to the nineties.
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