(2016)The Tidal Zone

by Sarah Moss

  Architecture as a form of prayer. Worship in glass and stone. God direct you.

  He went to find his wife and they got into their car and drove from Edinburgh to Coventry, three hundred miles and no motorways in those days, to hear what the ruins might say to him.

  The ruins said that they were still a church. They said that they were still holy. They said that there are places that cannot be destroyed.

  He stood at the north end, where once there had been effigies and tombs, where the light from stained glass windows would once have fallen around his feet, where the echoes of boys’ voices had flown for five hundred years under the fallen roof. He looked out over the rubble-strewn land where the new cathedral had not yet risen. There were the shells of bombed houses, as across all British cities. There were trees, some dead and some still dropping brown and yellow leaves, the open hands of horse-chestnuts, probably, and since Dutch elm disease was still thirty years in the future let us allow ourselves an elm tree or two. He saw a great high altar there, with a huge image of Christ behind it, and he saw them darkly, through the bodies of saints etched into the air.

  The Cathedral appeared to him.

  a note just too high to hear

  I put the laptop down and went to lean over the banisters. My father’s voice, deeper than mine. I don’t hear his accent but other people say he still sounds American. Nothing from Miriam, who was probably knitting again, as if the alleged scarf had become her work for these days. I opened my browser and tried again to find research on genetics and anaphylactic shock, tried to find someone telling me that what had happened to Miriam and probably to my mother was not also waiting to befall Rose. To repeat itself. Below me, Dad was still talking.

  Spring came slowly on Bear Mountain Ridge. Snow fell throughout February. The world was white and grey and blue as far as the eye could see, and Eli began to hunger for green. Further west, he knew, in Oregon and California, there would be trees budding in sunshine and the smell of flowers on a warm wind. He had never meant to settle here.

  Rainbow rummaged in the attic, where she was storing apples picked from the old orchard back in September, and came down with dust in her hair and two pairs of old snow-shoes, made of ash and leather, in her hands. Antiques, Eagle said, and they speculated about the people who had lived on the farm fifty years ago and put them away one spring. Indigo was lying on one of the cushions, red-cheeked, eyes glittering; he’d been sick for a few days. Maybe they got too old, he said. Maybe they got proper skis, Scott said. Maybe she was pregnant, and then couldn’t go out snow-shoeing with the baby, Joan said. Do you think it would be wrong to try them, asked Rainbow. Do you think they should be in a museum? Honey, said Eagle, I bet the museums round here have more snow-shoes than they know what to do with. I bet they have cellars stacked with the things. Go ahead, if you want to. Try them. Eli, ever been snow-shoeing? Of course not, a Jewish boy from Brooklyn.

  The clothes he carried weren’t really adequate for more than half an hour or so outside, but Rainbow had knitted him a hat and a big scarf, using more of the itchy brown yarn that Joan had found for almost nothing last summer, and he borrowed Eagle’s sweater, tried not to notice the smell of Eagle’s sweat. The sun was blinding white in the blue sky and the tree-shadows fell blue on snow too bright for his eyes. He’d never even seen anyone snow-shoe. Rainbow had done it once, she said, as a child staying with cousins, and that time she’d more or less picked it up by the end of the morning. He staggered and lurched against a tree. One of those things like ice-skating or riding a bicycle, he said, easier to learn when you’re small and used to falling over. No, she said, look, I’ve got it, but of course she hadn’t. Get up, he said, the snow will melt into your clothes, and he pulled her to her feet and into his arms.

  When they returned to the house, hungry and sore-eyed but laughing, there was a silence, a tension inside the door as if a note just too high to hear rang in the air. Joan was sitting beside Indigo now, stroking his head. He appeared to be asleep and you could hear his breathing from the hall.

  Eli went over to Joan. She didn’t look up. ‘Joan? You think he’s really sick?’

  Her hand kept moving over Indigo’s hair and her face stayed bent over his. ‘He’s not answering. I tried to wake him.’

  Eli knelt beside them and rocked Indigo’s shoulder. ‘Hey, Indy. I just tried snow-shoeing. I’m even worse at it than Rainbow. You should have a go. Indy?’

  The child turned his head, muttered.

  Joan looked up. ‘OK. We need a doctor.’

  Eagle leant in the doorway. ‘We can’t pay a doctor, honey. Plus, they’d fill him with drugs. Kids do get sick, always have. They wouldn’t have had doctors and pharmaceuticals out here in the old days.’

  ‘Yes, and a lot of kids died out here in the old days. Have you seen the churchyard? Go down to town and call a doctor, Eli. He’s not responding. He’s had a fever for days.’

  Rainbow came over and touched Indigo’s face. He turned away from her cold fingers. ‘He’s kind of responding, Joanie. But she’s right, Eagle, he needs to see someone. We could carry him down to the car, drive him to the hospital.’

  ‘No,’ said Joan. ‘He’d get too cold. Get a doctor.’ She put her lips to his cheek. ‘He’s even hotter. Jesus, have we not even got a thermometer here?’

  Rainbow went over and tugged at the window, which hadn’t been opened since Eli arrived and was part-blocked by snow anyway.

  ‘Open the door,’ said Eli. ‘Joan, a thermometer wouldn’t make him any better. We can cool him down a little. I’ll bring a damp cloth.’

  The child was limp when they tried to take off his sweater, and his breathing seemed to fill the house.

  Eagle came over and touched Indigo’s cheek. ‘Sponge him down,’ he said. ‘Give it a little time. Maybe this is the crisis and he’ll be better in an hour or so.’

  Joan looked up. ‘Call the fucking doctor or I’ll leave him here with – with’ she looked around ‘– with Eli and do it myself.’

  Indigo coughed, a sound too loud and deep for his ribcage.

  Eagle stood back. ‘We’ve got nothing to pay a doctor.’

  Eli looked at Rainbow. ‘I’ll go,’ he said. ‘Eagle, I’m borrowing your sweater again.’

  In the hallway, he borrowed Scott’s boots and gloves. Rainbow came as he was winding the scarf. ‘Here,’ she said. ‘Car keys. You might need them. Eli, do you want me to come too?’

  He shook his head. ‘Stay with Joan. You know I don’t know how this is going to go, right? I don’t have a doctor’s number. We probably do need to get him to the hospital.’

  He had read, of course, about kids who got fevers and died. Dickens. Steinbeck. It usually took a while. The breathing noise seemed to press against the door. A spirit wanting to get out. How could the kid have been sitting up and talking this morning and like this now? There were voices from the room and then Joan appeared just as he was opening the door. She held a piece of paper.

  ‘Eli. This is my dad’s number. Call him, OK? Right after you call the doctor. Tell him Indigo’s really sick. Tell him I need him to come.’

  Eli looked at Joan, at Rainbow. Joan’s parents were not among those who wrote and sent money and gifts. Only, he remembered, a parcel of books for Indigo at Christmas, and a new winter coat for him.

  ‘You sure, Joan? You’re sure you want me to do that?’

  She held the door for him. ‘Do it. And thank you.’

  There was a doctor in the town, and when he heard Eli’s story he said a few things about irresponsible hippies but he got out his truck and coaxed it a good way up the mountain road before tramping the rest of the way at Eli’s side. None of his business, he said, what Eli and his friends were doing up here, but it was plain stupid not to think about emergencies, plain stupid to have a child up here and no phone.

  Eagle wasn’t there when they arrived. Indigo still seemed to be asleep, although maybe his breathing was a little quieter. He muttered again wh
en the doctor shook him. Joan sat back, her face closed, and they all watched the doctor listen to Eli’s chest.

  ‘Sit him up,’ the doctor said. He pushed his hand under Indigo’s shoulders and lifted him. Indigo’s head flopped forward. Joan held him while the doctor held the stethoscope to his back.

  ‘Pneumonia,’ the doctor said. He looked around at the cushions and the piles of clothes and blankets along the wall. ‘How long has he been like this?’

  The doctor and Eli took turns carrying Indigo back to the car. Joan followed, silent. As they were putting him onto the back seat, he opened his eyes.

  ‘Mommy?’

  ‘I’m here, sweetie. I’m here. I’m coming with you.’

  He nodded and closed his eyes again.

  Eli left two days later, walked down to the town with his haversack and thumbed a lift to the next town, making his way towards the city where Indigo was making good progress in the hospital and Joan was staying in a hotel with her parents. Bear Mountain Ridge had turned out, he thought, to be just another family, another angry dad and another anxious mother. It was not for this that he’d left home.

  He was going to miss Rainbow, in the next place.

  still

  Miriam went on knitting. She’d borrowed Emma’s iPad and found, of course, a website that showed her how to do it a better way than Emma had remembered. The website had a large American woman wearing a regrettably girlish home-made jumper and speaking very slowly while smiling into her webcam. So, you put your right needle – that’s the one in your right hand, I mean, not the one on the right-hand side of your screen – into the front loop, here, like this, and then you take your yarn in your left hand – I know it’s a little awkward here at the beginning but you’ll soon get into the way of it— Mim, I said, how many times have you watched that?

  She touched the screen and looked up from the sofa. She’d put on weight in hospital, all those treats and no exercise, and it wasn’t going to come off with knitting. ‘A few. You learn by repetition. Muscle memory.’

  She waited a moment, the way, I thought, she wouldn’t have waited, wouldn’t have paused, before, and then when I said nothing more took up her needles and wool and focused again on the screen. Muscle memory. Maybe she was finding her own occupational therapy. Maybe she’d just found a wholesome new hobby. I would call school again, remind them that she was still here and still waiting for her Individual School Health Plan, still needing an education so she could still have a future.

  ‘What about seeing some of your friends?’ I said. ‘You said you were going to text Charlotte.’

  She was frowning at her wool and didn’t reply. I overcame the desire to snatch the web from her hands and throw it across the room. Speak to me. Come back. Come out, wherever you are.

  ‘Mim?’

  ‘Yeah. She’s coming over. After school.’ She stopped again, wound the wool around the needle, frowned and wound it back again.

  ‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Good.’ I watched her for another moment. ‘Do you want to come for a walk? To the park?’

  She shook her head. We like the park, Miriam and I. We like the way a group of elderly Sikh gentlemen meet on the benches by the glasshouse every fine afternoon, to share tea from thermos flasks and pass around Punjabi newspapers, and the way one day last summer we could have taken a photo of the local folk dancing club doing the Gay Gordons on the grass, watched by a group of women in burqas picnicking under the trees with an assortment of small children, like a promotional film for a version of Englishness that is now not going to happen. We share snide remarks about the people using their phones to film squirrels.

  ‘Come on. I haven’t been, either, since you – for weeks. I’ll buy you a coffee in the café. Grandpa’s collecting Rose, we’ve got time.’

  She didn’t look up. ‘I’m happy here, thanks.’

  I watched her hands. Come on, Mim, do something, get up off that sofa and march against austerity or ban the bomb or fuck the patriarchy or something.

  ‘I’ll make a cake,’ I said. ‘Charlotte likes cake, right?’

  ‘Uh-huh.’ She glanced up. ‘Everyone likes cake, Dad. It’s probably a thought crime not to like cake in this country. It probably means you’re a terrorist. Baking: we’re all in it together.’

  Ah ha. A reaction.

  ‘You mean it’s not still counter-cultural for a man to make a Victoria sponge?’

  She was moving the wool again. ‘Barely. You’re going to have to join a book group or take up Pilates to stay ahead. Do some dusting.’

  ‘I do do some dusting. Weekly. You’d notice if I didn’t.’

  ‘OK, Dad. Whatever you say.’

  I started to cream together the butter, which was still hard from the fridge, with less sugar than the recipe suggests, because there are some risks we can mitigate and Type 2 diabetes is one of them. My dad, who was still getting used to texting, sent a message to say that he was ‘talking Rose to the pork’. I knew what he meant. He was trying to compensate a little for Rose’s indoor life, for the intensive farming of modern urban childhood. Since he couldn’t give her a tideline, a wood and a vegetable patch, he would take her to the river and the swings, show her face to the sky and the last of the winter daylight before bringing her back to our heated hutch, where the windows frame the neighbours’ television through their garden doors at the back and the car park of the flats across the road at the front. I squashed lumps of butter against the bowl with a wooden spoon. It’s not my fault, I thought, I didn’t plan this, didn’t intend our cramped prosperity, but the truth was that I hadn’t planned anything. I had done a PhD because I was interested in Ashbee and was offered funding, without feeling particularly driven towards an academic career. I had met Emma and coasted along cooking for her and writing my thesis without attending the conferences or publishing the articles that would have helped me to get a job afterwards because it didn’t really occur to me to do so. I had bumbled through six cheerful months in Hamburg where she was doing a medical rotation and I thought about Ashbee, learnt German and went running every day around the lake, and soon after that Miriam came and saved me from planning much beyond puréeing sweet potatoes before lunch and making sure we didn’t run out of babywipes. (God knows how parents coped and of course in much of the world cope now without babywipes; they are one of the minor miracles of the twentieth century.) I didn’t mean it, Dad, didn’t mean to end up in a brick box in the Midlands where some of the rooms are smaller than the car on the drive and we’re still always, endlessly, grateful that we’ve been able to buy a house at all and especially grateful that we’ve been able to buy a house close to pleasant parks and paths across the fields and also fast trains to London, grateful that, as Emma says, our house earns more some years than she does, simply by sitting here and being bricks on soil, being cramped and messy and having a third of the floor area devoted to bathrooms, more square metres of bathroom than garden. I know it doesn’t look like it to you, Dad, raised in America and spending your adult life in intentional communities where money is a dirty word and space unlimited, but we’re lucky here, lucky and privileged, and I didn’t mean it. I took the eggs from the fridge. Shut up, Adam, you’re not in court. He probably just meant that he’s taking her to the park.

  ‘Mimi?’ I said. ‘Mimi, do you ever want to move to the country?’

  Her gaze moved slowly, as if she was drugged. ‘What?’

  I cracked an egg. ‘Do you ever want to move to the country?’

  Her eyes returned to her knitting. ‘What, so I can’t leave the house unless you drive me and there’s nothing to do? Nope.’

  I beat the egg. It doesn’t actually make any difference when the mixture curdles.

  ‘Dad? You know it would be a total cliché to move to the country because I nearly died?’

  She did die. Her heart stopped, and then it started again. I cracked the other egg. ‘I was actually thinking more about what might make us all happy than about what might look like a cli
ché. There’s no audience, you know, life isn’t a performance. Maybe clichés do make people happy, maybe that’s why they’re clichés.’

  ‘Or maybe they’re clichés because they further the interests of global capitalism, like convincing people that buying and selling property is the key to happiness and that better people own more land.’

  I bit my lip to hold my smile, as if smiling at her were for some reason unsafe. I weighed the flour. Not damaged, then, not in any essential way. And, of course, right.

  ‘OK,’ I said. ‘You win.’

  But she didn’t get up to answer the door when Charlotte arrived. You go, she said, I’m in the middle of a row. She’s your friend, I said, you haven’t seen her for weeks, surely you can put down the knitting, but Charlotte knocked again and I didn’t want her to go away so I opened the door. (The doorbell, I think, may be another casualty of rising house-prices: who now can afford a house in which you can be far enough from the front door not to hear someone knock? Shut up, Adam, says Emma’s voice in my head, can you not stop with the political analysis of everything for long enough to answer the bloody door?)

  Charlotte looked just as she had done a month earlier, which shouldn’t have been surprising. I’ve known her for ten years, since she was an elfin four-year-old in a neat uniform who watched pityingly as her classmates, swamped in shirts bought for growth and with ties down to their knees, clung to their mothers and in some cases wept on the first day of school. There were, as usual, only mothers and they were, as usual, not talking to me, until Charlotte’s mother said, I sometimes think my daughter doesn’t actually like me very much, I sometimes think I’ve spent so much time at work that she no longer cares if I’m there or not. I had never seen either of them before. I’m sure she cares, I said, you’re raising an independent young woman, you probably wouldn’t worry about it if she were a boy. Yeah, she said, sorry, I’m Kate, I don’t usually spill my guilt all over strangers, it’s an odd day. It was an odd day for me too, the six hours to come my longest separation from Miriam since her birth, but I had enough sense not to say that to Kate, who had seen in my masculinity a fellow in employment, to whom it had not occurred that a man might be on the other side of the great divide between gainfully employed and stay-at-home mothers.