by Lucy Wood
Every day, as soon as Russell left for work, Maddy would go into the spare room. The boxes would be open, the wrecker muttering and sifting through them. She would open books, scan the pages, run her finger along pictures and spines swollen with damp.
‘Once upon a time,’ the wrecker would murmur, his voice hollow and mournful.
She would take out paper flowers, board games, hairpins, and lay them out on the carpet in rows. Her mother had collected jars of buttons and Maddy would tip them out and divide them into piles by colour, by shape. She wound and rewound a clock. She took photos out of albums, studied each one, and then carefully slotted them back inside the crinkled plastic. The house aged in each picture – it began to fade, cracks appeared, the roof warped, roots dug themselves into foundations.
She would unfold the threadbare, dusty clothes that she used to dress up in: a crocheted shawl, a fur hat, waders, high heels. She would unwrap jewellery from tissue paper, sort through drill bits and nails. She would look over address books, recipes, newspaper clippings.
The wrecker stacked up lampshades and crockery. ‘Could do with a drink,’ he would say. ‘A lot to get through and the water’s coming.’
Minutes turned into hours. When all the boxes were empty, Maddy would pack them up again, collecting everything together, closing the lids up tight. She would sigh, stay sitting among the boxes. Sand piled up in drifts.
‘False lights,’ the wrecker said, leaning out of the window. He polished his lamp and watched as the sky turned dark blue and other lights appeared, one by one, in the distance. Damp, humid air clamoured around him like birds.
Stones appeared: grey and purple, some with dark veins, some speckled with silver. Pebbles snaked down the hall; there were six smooth stones huddled in the corner of the bathroom, more inside cupboards. Tiny shells came out of the taps and filled the sink.
‘Jesus, Maddy,’ Russell said when he got in from work. He put his bag down and went over to the table. The wrecker had dragged stones across it and there were faint scratches in rings. ‘Why didn’t you stop him? You’ve been here all day.’ He licked his finger and tried to rub out the scratches.
‘I didn’t notice,’ Maddy said. She looked over at the table, at Russell. What was it the wrecker had told her? Something about wading out to sea, listening to crews talking on the trawlers and oil tankers that passed by. He heard them talking in Portuguese, Norwegian.
‘How could you not notice?’ Russell said. ‘He would have dragged them right past you.’ He picked up a stone and dropped it on the floor.
‘It’s not worth anything,’ the wrecker said, glancing at the table. Maddy could hear waves rolling over and seagulls cawing inside his throat.
‘I didn’t notice,’ she said again. She started to get up, to go over to Russell, but there was a heap of stones in her lap. She picked one up; it was cold and fitted perfectly in her hand.
Russell pushed the stones on to the floor. He kicked over the pile of stones in the bathroom. He picked up armfuls of them and took them outside.
Next morning, they were all back in exactly the same places.
‘Prevailing winds, new moon,’ the wrecker said. ‘Temperatures rising.’ Sand heaped under the table and the bed. The damp mark rose on the walls.
‘You should get out of the house,’ Russell told Maddy. ‘When did you last go out?’
‘I’m fine,’ she said.
‘Come on,’ he said. ‘We need to get out.’
‘Another time.’ She sifted through the sand with her fingers.
The news reported that the heat wave could break in the next few days. The wrecker shook his head. ‘More high pressure,’ he said.
No sound from the kitchen. The door was closed. The wrecking light shone faintly underneath and, now and again, it flashed and darkened as the wrecker paced in front of it.
Russell’s favourite film was playing. ‘Sit like this,’ he said to Maddy. He pulled her towards him so she was leaning against his chest. She could feel his heartbeat. It was fluttery and fast and she pressed her ear against it. From there, she could see the water mark on the wall. It had risen again. She needed to watch it, keep a closer eye on it. It always rose the moment she looked away.
Russell shifted on the sofa and kept glancing at the kitchen door. ‘What’s he doing in there?’ he said. ‘I missed that bit. Have they found out where the killer is?’ He leaned forwards, fixed his eyes on the TV. A man was being followed down a dark street. He stopped to light a cigarette. He carried on walking and his footsteps rang out on the pavement. The person behind got closer. He was carrying a gun.
Maybe the damp is rising right now, Maddy thought. She looked over quickly but the line hadn’t moved.
The man with the gun raised his arm.
There was a crash and a sizzling, spitting noise from the kitchen. Acrid smoke swept into the room.
‘Shit,’ Russell said. He jumped up and pulled open the kitchen door.
‘Heat rising and converging,’ the wrecker said. He was hunched over the gas flame holding a charred gull’s feather. Smoke poured off it. The alarm started its piercing wail.
Russell reached forwards and switched off the flame. He opened the window as wide as it would go and fanned the smoke out but it stayed where it was, hovering at waist height. ‘You need to leave,’ he said.
The wrecker stared at the place where the flame had been. ‘The moon has craters and seas,’ he said. ‘Plato, Copernicus, Mare Crisium.’ He smiled slowly.
Russell took a step towards him. ‘You need to leave,’ he said.
The wrecker smiled again. There was a quiet pop and the lights went out. The alarm stopped. The TV went blank. The fridge and freezer shuddered and ground to a halt. Silence spread over the flat. Outside, the street lamps were all still on and there were lights in other windows. The wrecker’s lamp flickered, didn’t cast any shadows.
Maddy leaned against the door frame. She was used to power cuts. They always used to have them. Her parents would get out candles and wind-up torches. The house would be scary at first, all dark spaces to cross and places for things to hide. Once, she heard her parents arguing, maybe she heard a plate hit a wall, but all that was forgotten – the house would glow, creak, rock her to sleep.
The silence deepened and spread. Russell paced in the bedroom. At 3 a.m. the wrecker’s heavy footsteps moved through the flat. He sat on the sofa and the TV and lights clicked on quietly.
The damp mark rose halfway to the ceiling. Water gathered behind the walls, making them buckle like tired knees.
‘This place hasn’t got any weather,’ the wrecker said. ‘Where’s all the mist blowing in? Where’s all the sea mist?’ He looked in the boxes. ‘Where’s all the water?’
Hours passed like minutes and Maddy hardly noticed. ‘Look,’ she said to the wrecker, ‘painted plates.’
He looked at them with his pale eyes. ‘Moon almost full,’ he said, nodding.
The front door opened and Russell came in quietly and went straight into the bedroom. The wardrobe creaked. He went into the bathroom and came back out holding soap and his toothbrush. Maddy watched as he packed up a bag.
‘I can’t put it off,’ Russell said, not meeting her eyes. ‘Mike phoned me at work, asked if I could come and stay. They’ve got the new baby now.’ He put socks in the bag, a torch, a book, a jumper. He packed as if he were nine years old, running away from home for the first time. Her heart felt damp and tired.
‘OK,’ she said. Russell wasn’t allowed to take phone calls at work. The thought came from a long way away; she hardly noticed it. She went into the kitchen and made him a sandwich to take.
‘Thanks,’ Russell said. He packed it carefully. ‘They’ve given me next week off.’
‘OK,’ Maddy said.
‘I’ll ring you,’ Russell told her. He paused halfway through the door, then closed it quietly behind him.
After he had left, she walked slowly around the flat. She touched the walls
and the windows and the doors. They were all damp. She left a handprint in the wet window.
‘Full moon,’ the wrecker said. He pointed at the sky. The moon hung there like a floating leaf. ‘Those waves,’ he said. ‘Those tides.’ He stared out of the window. He ran a feather along the sill.
Later, every noise Maddy heard became the front door opening, but it didn’t open. She lay awake. Through the wall, the wrecker drowned again, over and over and over.
The town swayed in the heat. Afternoons turned to dark blue dusk. ‘False lights,’ the wrecker said.
The boxes were packed and unpacked. Tools, saucepans, candles, her father’s old records, scratched and battered. Bird paintings, keys. The waxy smell of potpourri, the mustiness of cushions.
Sometimes the phone rang, but it cut off just before she could get to it.
At night, her old house loomed like a shipwreck. The bare whalebones of the kitchen. Doors and cupboards floated out of the dark. Things shifted – if she walked into one hallway, she ended up in another. They stretched forwards without ending. One stairway became another stairway – front doors switched and opened out on to a porch, a street full of cars, a garden, miles and miles of water.
A bundle of letters. The wrecker rifled through them, the dry pages rustling and then sticking together under his damp fingers. ‘Not worth anything,’ he said. ‘No good.’ He threw them aside, picked up the glass vase, tested its weight and put it on the biggest pile. ‘That bit, not that bit,’ he said, going back over shoes and beads.
Maddy picked the letters up. Her grandmother’s writing, her cousin’s. The pages were brown and thin, well-thumbed. Slotted in the middle, almost hidden, were different letters, typed, addressed to her mother. Maddy read them over. She read them again. She put them back in the box.
The wrecker paced around the flat. ‘Cumulus and cirrus,’ he said. He started to swing his lamp in the window, slowly, for hours.
Another dream: her old house floated upwards on currents of air like a bird. Bricks and stone piled up and then toppled and crashed down and she woke up expecting to see bricks all around her.
The carpet in the hall was soaking. Her feet sunk in and left dents that slowly filled, as if it were a mire or quicksand. Water pooled in the doorway of the spare bedroom. The door frame dripped. The boxes looked darker, their sides bulged and warped.
The wrecker was pacing around the room. ‘Where am I?’ he asked. ‘Where’s all the water?’
Maddy opened the lids and wet cardboard tore off in her hand. The smell of wet cardboard. The smell of wet paper and wool. She looked inside the boxes. They were full of sand and water. Paper was soaked through and torn. Keys had rusted. Sand had worked its way behind the glass of clocks and packed itself into jars. A box gave way and split and water spilled over her feet.
‘What have you done?’ she asked the wrecker.
The wrecker paced and paced. ‘There’s a whole town underwater,’ he said.
‘My things,’ Maddy said. ‘Everything.’
He sat down. Water sloshed over the tops of his boots. ‘There was a flood. No one knew it was going to happen. Houses and trees underwater.’
Maddy knelt down and scooped sand out of the boxes. There was too much of it and eventually she gave up, let it trickle over her feet.
‘It’s not worth anything,’ the wrecker told her, staring out of the window.
Maddy opened the front door and stepped out on to the street. The light hurt her eyes and she blinked, once, twice. She couldn’t remember the last time she had been out. Her key felt strange in her hand. The front steps were overgrown with wilted yellow flowers; the grass had turned brown and dry. There was a strange hush, as if things had been paused, suspended.
Her car was coated in dust and pollen. Inside, plastic on the dashboard had melted and solidified in small ripples. She drove out of town. A breeze came in through the window, cooler perhaps, thinner. It picked up as she got nearer the sea and the roads opened out. ‘Beware crosswinds,’ a sign said. Her mother used to think they’d be pushed right off the cliff. She used to lean her body the other way, against the wind, as if to balance them out.
It was early evening when she got there. The moon was already out. She saw the chimney of the house first, rising up from behind the hill, and then she turned a corner and there was the sea, laid out flat in front of her. Everything was so familiar that she seemed to see the chimney, the sea, a moment before they actually appeared – and so as she drove, the landscape echoed, repeated itself, like somebody who was old or lonely.
She turned down the lane that led to the house, the car bumping and sinking into potholes. She stopped in front of the gate. She had expected the house to be ramshackle by now, half wild. She thought the wind would have found its way into it, making the holes and cracks wider, buckling the roof. She had imagined the magnolia pushing its way through the windows. But the house was newly painted, reinforced, the roof had been fixed and there were different tiles on it. It looked strong, storm-proof. She got out of the car, a few goosebumps on her arms. The wrecker’s voice clamoured for attention in her ear but she pushed it aside and it became nothing more than a seagull cawing above her.
There was a child swinging on the gate. She stared at Maddy. She had a sequined evening dress on, so big it slipped down over her chest. She clutched the gate with bare sandy feet. ‘Who are you?’ she asked.
‘There used to be a magnolia,’ Maddy said. ‘By that window.’
‘You mean the lantern tree? It got cut down. I cried, although Dad said I shouldn’t.’
‘Cut down.’
‘He said it creaked too much. He said it would keep me awake. He’s scared of storms, I think. Why’s there pollen all over your car?’ She kicked at the wood, wiped sand off her cheek.
‘I used to live here,’ Maddy told her.
The girl narrowed her eyes to stones. She swung harder, looked back at the house. ‘I’m late for my party,’ she said, although she didn’t climb down off the gate.
Maddy stood in the street, looking up. There was no light in her kitchen window. No flame flickered out through the glass. A cool breeze caught her hair and moved on. The house was dark. There were pebbles scattered over the pavement and in the front garden. She felt like she was returning from a long way away. She could hear the phone ringing from inside. ‘Where have you been?’ Russell would ask her when they spoke, his voice fragile and graceful as a bird. The house was dark and quiet. She would lean into the phone, hold it as close as she could to her ear, the connection brief and distant, but she would grasp it as she would a hand reaching down through water.
The street was hushed. Someone had tied a balloon to their front door and it strained against its string, trying, always, to lift away.
The phone rang again. She walked into the dark house.
Magpies
I was driving home. The sky was dark blue and the trees along the road, all bent in one direction, looked like the silhouettes of fishermen leaning over water. I was taking the longer route back. The road wound up high and everything around it was bare and wind-battered. Whatever the weather was, you knew about it up there, and it could change quickly, too. You could be driving along and suddenly there would be clouds and then rain when there hadn’t been any clouds before. Sleet could roll in. I swear that I once saw forked lightning on a still, blue day. Each flash was so bright I saw them for hours after, stamped on the kitchen walls and in the bathroom mirror.
I wound the window down, let in the cool air. I was thinking about these dreams my wife had been having. It had got to the point where every night she would dream about the last thing I’d talked about. So I mention the crack in the stairs and she dreams of me walking up a staircase and out through the roof. I mention the rust on my bike wheel and she dreams of fairgrounds, the smell of them, the clank of metal and lights in the distance. It was getting to me but I didn’t know why. I kept thinking about it and I kept thinking I wouldn’t say anything t
hat she could possibly dream about, but then she’d ask me questions, get me talking about something or other, and straight away I’d forget.
I’d just been to see Mae. She was back in town for a few days and we’d met at Herb’s, the roadside café we always used to go to. I still go there a lot, sometimes with a couple of guys after work, sometimes by myself. There’s usually someone you can get talking to – Herb, people travelling on business, long-haul drivers.
I sat at a table in the corner and waited. There was the usual smell of vinegar and coffee and frying. Herb’s classical music playing in the kitchen. Pictures of horse-racing and framed newspaper clippings about local disasters. I loved the place. It felt like things could happen there, anyone could be passing through. It was pretty empty that evening, just one other guy by the door, a motorbike helmet on the table next to him. He reminded me of the time I’d seen what I thought was a horrific motorbike crash. I’d pulled over, shaking, gone up to the pieces of metal and helmet strewn across the road, but it was all brand new, with warehouse labels stuck on from where they’d fallen off the back of a lorry.
I changed gear and thought about what Mae had said about it being four years since she’d last seen me. I was sure it was only two – I didn’t realise time had gone that fast. I opened the window a little wider; there was a good breeze. My skin felt warm and clammy. Time must be going faster than I thought. I was thinking about that, trying to recollect what I’d done in the last few years, when something banged hard into the car.
‘What the devil?’ I said, which is what I always say when something surprises me. I’d rather swear like anybody else but I can’t shift it – my granddad says it and the words have stuck to me like burrs. I pulled over but I didn’t really think I’d hit anything. Maybe I saw a flash at the last minute, something black, some kind of movement, but I thought it was a stone at most. I turned the engine off, got out, and looked under the wheels. There were other tyre marks, a few stones, but nothing else. Something pale caught my eye but it was just sheep’s wool tangled in the hedge.