by Lucy Wood
This night was different, though. He came in the front door and went straight up the stairs and knocked softly on her bedroom door. She was almost asleep and the knocking got into her dreams and she thought it was somebody hammering a nail into a wall. ‘What picture?’ she asked.
‘Are you awake?’ her father said. He came into the room and sat on the side of her bed. ‘Are you awake?’ She opened her eyes and looked at him. He was wearing his jacket and his shoes. ‘Come outside. I want to show you something.’ He rubbed at his cheek and when he spoke there was the grey tooth among the white ones. It was grey and maybe getting darker. A dying tooth.
‘What?’ she asked. He smelled sour and smoky and of sweat. ‘What?’ she asked again. He got up off the bed and wandered around her room, picking things up and studying them: her harmonica, her cactus. He touched a leaf on her mimosa and it bowed downwards. She had gone on a school trip a week ago and asked him to water it but he must have forgotten because this was a new one. She could tell because there was no yellow leaf at the bottom and there was a pink flower out when there hadn’t even been a bud before.
‘Your plant,’ he said. ‘A flower.’
She nodded and swung her legs out. It was cold out of bed. Her pyjamas were too short and stopped before her ankles and they were starting to stretch across the chest so that her belly showed. Her duvet fell off and her father put it back on the bed. She swayed, almost asleep standing up, so he picked her up and carried her. She hadn’t been carried in a long time. They went down the stairs slowly; sometimes her head grazed the wall, sometimes her back. Her face was pressed up against his neck. His skin smelled of the hair products he used at the barber’s. His hair was combed back; if you touched it, it was hard like plasticine. There weren’t any bits that stuck out or felt soft. It was light brown hair, fading to nearly colourless, and it smelled like candles. As she was being carried, she ran a finger across the straight, neat line at the back of his hair, lightly so that he wouldn’t notice. He had some deep lines in his cheeks and a pale row of chickenpox scars on his forehead. He was thin and wiry and not very tall. He had a split down his thumbnail that had never healed and his hands felt dry because they were always in water or on wet hair or had wax on them.
Her father cut her hair. He wrote her name in the appointment book just like anyone else’s, first name and surname. The appointments were usually straight after school or on a Saturday morning. The barber’s shop was a small room with one chair in front of a mirror and a sink. The lights were bright and one always buzzed but never got fixed. The floor was chequered in black and white tiles. In one corner there were two white tiles next to one another because there had been a mistake. Only men went in there to get their hair cut. There were two more chairs next to a low table full of newspapers and magazines and a tray with a kettle and a jar of coffee and three mugs. Whenever she went in there, the men would lower the magazines they were looking at and put them face down to try and hide the topless women on the cover. Then they would shuffle around and grin and touch the backs of their necks and ask her questions like what did she want to be when she grew up, or what was her favourite food, big questions that you should only ask someone once you knew them very well. ‘A chef,’ she would say quietly. ‘Toasted cheese sandwiches.’ She hung her bag and her coat carefully on the stand.
He put her down at the bottom of the stairs, among the shoes and umbrellas. There was a wooden triptych hanging on the wall, three birds engraved in three trees. It came with the house. Her father had moved it to cover a shallow hole in the wall that hadn’t come with the house. He looked at it while she put on trainers. He checked his watch and then told her she would need a coat. She looked at the coats lined up on their hooks and then she looked up at her father. She took one of his coats, a grey woollen one, and put it on. It reached past her knees and her arms were lost inside the sleeves. He opened the front door and they went outside. While he locked it, she rolled up the sleeves of the coat. They walked through the gate and then across the road and into the field. Her father walked quickly and she had to run a few steps to catch up. He put his hands in his pockets. She put her hands in his pockets. Inside, there were two coins. She asked him how come they were outside; did he remember it was school tomorrow? She had a project. ‘There’s something,’ he said. ‘Rich told me about it at the pub. I’d forgotten it was tonight.’
It was cold and damp and windless. Everywhere there was the memory of wind in the fraying edges of things and the stooped-over branches. The field was full of holes so she had to slow down, walk looking at the ground. Up ahead, her father stopped suddenly and swore and shook his foot around. ‘Watch out for cow shit.’ She caught up and followed behind him, putting her feet where he had put his feet. The field was wet and sometimes his feet left a shallow, watery print. The prints were narrow: he had thin, narrow feet.
‘You’re thin,’ she said. His thinness had been on her mind for a long time. He hardly ever seemed to eat. One of his shoulders lifted up but he didn’t say anything.
Now that her eyes were used to the dark, it was much easier to see – it hardly seemed dark at all. It was strange. She thought it would be darker outside at night, but the night actually looked darker from inside the house. What the night was was this: shapes that were pale and shapes that were dark. The track was paler than the rest of the field; there were pale stones in the grass; the hedge they were walking towards was darker. There were shallow trails of water through the grass and they were pale and gleaming, and then one bigger spill of water and, inside that, two or three stars. She looked up and saw that there were more than two or three stars, many more, thousands of them, hanging above their heads in patterns. She stood still, staring.
‘Come on,’ her father said.
‘I didn’t see them before,’ she said.
‘They’ve been there the whole time.’
She carried on looking up. The stars spread over the whole sky, over the whole moor.
‘Come on,’ her father said again.
He walked on, towards the end of the field, and she followed.
‘How many stars are there?’ she asked.
‘I don’t know.’
‘Millions?’
He side-stepped something and then checked his watch.
‘Millions probably,’ she said.
‘Probably,’ he said.
She caught up and walked next to him and their legs walked in a pattern, left, right, left, right. Then there was the open gate at the bottom of the field.
There were stories about people disappearing. Last year there was that woman, and before that, a man. No one could remember their names or what they looked like but everyone knew someone who knew someone who had known them. ‘They don’t even leave the skeleton,’ kids said at school. ‘That’s because they don’t eat them, dumbass.’ ‘What do they do, then?’ ‘I dunno. They don’t eat them, though. It’s something else.’
What her father said was that people leave places for more reasons than she could understand. She had been going on about it for days and he hadn’t said a word. Then he just came out with it: people sometimes leave quickly, you wouldn’t understand. It didn’t sound right – why would they? It was evening, lights on and curtains open, and she suddenly pictured their house from the outside – small and fragile, the lights barely reaching into the dark, like a tiny boat in miles and miles of water.
She liked it best in the barber’s when there was no one else there, when there was just the radio playing too quietly to actually listen to, so that, once in a while, a stream of music would reach unexpectedly into your ear. When it was her turn, her father would nod to her and take down one of the black capes and wrap it twice around. Inside it, she felt crackly and static. He would raise the chair while she was sitting in it and she would watch in the mirror their faces getting closer together. She wondered if they looked similar. He would spray her hair with the plastic bottle of water until it was wet enough to cut. The water was n
ot too warm, not too cold. Above her head, on the ceiling, the bobbly paint looked like a woman’s face, just one side of it, her hair in a low bun, her eye heavy-lidded and sleepy, her mouth in an almost smile.
The gate was as far as she had been for years. She was all right if she went the other way – there was the town and the river. She didn’t mind going that way. But she hadn’t been past this gate for years. There was a deep patch of wet, churned-up mud separating the field from where it turned into the outer border of the moor. Her father started to walk around it, keeping to the dry edge. She heard howling – a sudden thin noise that bowled across the grass.
‘There,’ she said.
Her father kept to the dry edge. There was another howl and he paused, ever so slightly, as he took a step. Then he carried on and was over the mud.
‘There,’ she said again. ‘You heard it.’ She waited on the other side, the howl still in her skin.
‘What?’ he asked. ‘What?’
She pulled the coat tighter. The sleeves had unrolled but she kept them that way, her hands lost somewhere inside. Maybe they would go back now. She waited for him to turn around but he carried on walking. The night shifted itself to cover over his thin body so that in a matter of moments she couldn’t see him. She waited. She imagined the wisht hounds galloping along like the shadows of clouds.
‘They’re not even real,’ she said. It came out as a whisper. But what if they were out there? He shouldn’t walk around by himself like he did, and he didn’t eat enough either – there were dark spaces under his cheekbones. She had heard of people losing their energy and not being able to walk any further. She tried to make him eat more sometimes, but he just shook his head and looked past her at the TV, picking at his food, one foot jiggling restlessly.
She stood waiting for him to turn around and come back for her. Once, he had told her to phone up her gran for a chat, tell her how school was and about her plants. She had never liked using the phone and she dialled too quickly and when someone answered she said, ‘Hello, is that Gran?’ and the woman on the other end said yes it was, and it was a minute before she realised it wasn’t her gran she was speaking to, it was someone else’s. Her father was watching her speaking and she spoke about school, about her plants, about her stick insects, and waiting on the phone for the woman to say goodbye was how she felt now, standing by the gate, although she didn’t know why.
She looked back towards the house. All the lights were off, except for the bathroom light which shone out of the tiny window. Now and again, headlights passed on the road. She could turn round and go back, wait on the doorstep. She looked ahead. It wasn’t as dark as she had thought it would be. And their feet had walked in patterns. She didn’t want him to be alone with the wisht hounds. She went through the gate, keeping to where her father had walked. On the other side, she picked up a stone as big as her hand.
She walked in a straight line from the gate and hadn’t gone far when she heard a noise. It was someone laughing. There were two voices. One voice was her father’s. She gripped the stone. It had a rough edge like a tooth. She stood a little way away from the voices and after a while the other man saw her, and he stared and he carried on talking. They talked in low voices to each other and they laughed a lot, but not the kind of laughing where you knew they were talking about something funny. She had seen the other man before, in the barber’s, reading the paper, swirling strands of hair around on the floor with his foot. Straight after a haircut, his ears stuck out more and there was a pale band of skin along the back and around his ears. His wife had fooled around. That’s what she heard in the barber’s, that his wife had fooled around, but it didn’t seem like anything to mention.
‘Where were you?’ her father asked, but he didn’t seem to expect an answer.
‘Maybe she had to take a leak?’ the man said. He was drinking something from a bottle and he offered it to her father, who reached out and took it. She didn’t go any closer.
‘I didn’t have to,’ she said.
‘So I told him that if he thinks that pile of rust is worth that much, he’s got another think coming.’
‘He should scrap it. He should just scrap it.’
‘That’s what I told him. But he won’t hear it. He’s sentimental is what he is.’
‘I didn’t have to,’ she told them again.
They passed the bottle between them. ‘He should scrap it. It’s a pile of rust.’
‘That’s what I told him.’
The man kicked at the ground to dislodge a stone. It came out muddy and there was a streak of mud on his pale shoe.
‘He hit that horse with it, didn’t he? I thought he would have got rid of it when he hit that horse but he didn’t.’
‘I forgot about the horse.’
‘Yeah, the horse. Said its knees buckled like an airer. He said sometimes he can’t stop thinking about it.’
She stared at her father. ‘We had to hurry before,’ she said. It was cold and damp and windless. He gave her a look. He gave the bottle back to the man.
‘I don’t know how it didn’t get written off.’
She went up and stood close to his sleeve, which she knew annoyed him but she did it anyway.
‘I wanted to get up to the point,’ her father said.
‘Maybe I’ll join you,’ the other man said.
She pulled at her father’s sleeve. He reached his arm up, away, to touch his hair.
‘Yeah,’ he said.
‘Nice one.’
She felt a flash of hatred for him, for both of them. They started walking but she wanted to turn back. She trailed behind. It was too late to go back now. Everything looked the same to her; the ground looked the same everywhere but her father seemed to know exactly where he was going. They didn’t notice her trailing behind so she caught them up because she didn’t want to walk by herself. She walked out of sync with her father but wasn’t sure if he noticed or not. The other man whistled badly.
The moor was dotted with granite boulders and clumps of longer grass. It smelled damp. It smelled big and cold and lonely, like the moon might smell. The slopes were getting steeper. Her father told the other man he wanted to stay away from the mires further down.
‘Jesus Christ!’ the man said suddenly. He swatted at his face. ‘A fucking bat was this close, this close.’ He showed how close with his hands.
‘Bats don’t hurt you,’ she said.
‘That was too close for my liking,’ he said. He took another drink. ‘You know something I heard about bats? I think this is right anyway. They know the smell of the house or the barn they got born in, and they go back there and if they can’t get in because the chimney or the windows are boarded up, they bang against them and fly against them because they have to get back in.’
‘Why?’ her father asked.
‘I don’t know. That’s all I heard about it.’
‘Like moths looking for light,’ she said. She pictured those bats flinging themselves against a barn, trying to get back in.
‘Yeah, I guess like moths,’ the man said. Her father was quiet.
The ground was rockier. There were humped shapes all around. Her father tripped and fell on to his hands but he didn’t swear. He told her to be careful even though it was him who had fallen.
When he started cutting her hair, thin slivers would fall on to the floor around her feet, dark at first and then drying lighter and splitting into hundreds of scattered pieces, like salt or stars. He tried to be careful around her ears, because once she told him it hurt when he combed over them. He put an inch width of hair between two fingers and straightened it out to get the right length. She could only feel that he was touching her hair because she could feel the pull on her scalp. She wished that hair had feeling. Why didn’t hair have feeling? It would hurt too much when it got cut, she supposed. That was why. He always cut too short, so that her hair wouldn’t stay behind her ears and so that some of the girls at school said she looked like a boy. She had
started smuggling a silver clip in her school bag. She had found it under a loose corner of carpet in the bathroom. She kept it with a cake tin she’d found at the back of a cupboard and an old tin of mandarins, which she knew her father would never have bought, and a packet of sweet-pea seeds, years past the use-by date. She put the silver clip in her hair just after she left the house in the morning and took it out before she got back.
Sometimes he hummed songs she didn’t recognise; mostly he was quiet.
She watched her hair falling. The scissors made a noise like crickets. ‘All right?’ he would ask from time to time.
‘All right,’ she would reply, listening to the noise like crickets.
She wished the other man would fall over and roll away into the dark. He was breathing loudly and couldn’t walk that fast so he was slowing them down. She had no idea where they were going. She was walking in front now, keeping her head down and listening to where her father was walking to make sure she was going the right way. She listened and heard him stop, so she stopped and waited. ‘Just checking this is right,’ he said to the other man. He looked around and then nodded. It all looked the same to her. What if they were lost and he was just pretending that he knew where he was? She was sure that no one could tell. There were slopes and rocks, and sometimes big rounded rocks like people hunched over. ‘We haven’t got long till it starts.’
There was another low howl from the distance. She saw her father and the other man exchange a look then the man shoved his hands in his pockets and started whistling again. She hated it – they were keeping it, that, whatever it was, everything, from her. They shouldn’t even be out here. ‘We could stay here,’ the man said. ‘It won’t make any difference.’