That job, in its essentials, I still do now. I’ve taken on a few extra roles and responsibilities over the years, and local government has restructured many times, but I’m still part of the IT team, still based in an office that’s less than twenty miles from the small town where I was born, and still basically spend my time sorting out the problems that local government officers have with their PCs. My teachers at school had once expected a good deal more from me, I knew, but this is how I am. I flounder, I grab hold of whatever comes to hand, and then I cling on.
Josie and I stuck together in that exact same way. In the best moments we sort of peacefully co-existed. In the worst, we punished each other, undermined each other, poured cold water on each other’s hopes and dreams. If she found something hard that I found easy, I would feel ashamed of her and let her know it. If she did well at something I found hard, I would hate her for showing me up. Our sense of togetherness, such as it was, came mainly from the fact that, when we both found the same things hard, both of us together would pour scorn on the things that others could do and we could not: them and their flashy holidays, their fancy jobs, their attractive friends, their seemingly happy relationships.
Deep down we despised ourselves. We hated the fact that there was no love story behind us, just two lonely and unconfident people who’d noticed each other’s availability at an utterly forgettable event, and grabbed hold of one another because that seemed preferable, or at least less frightening, than the alternative of remaining alone. And of course we soon had kids to distract us from ourselves, and to give us a reason for being together.
But when the last of our children had left home, there was nothing left for us to hide behind. Rational human beings might have sat down at that point, figured out a way of sharing out their resources, found two new places to live, and parted calmly. It would have been entirely doable for us, at least in a practical sense – we each had a lump sum coming to us at retirement, and a reasonable pension – but that’s not what we did at all.
No. We fought. There were scores to be settled, slights to be avenged, and we fought without restraint, screaming out forty years’ worth of hate and bitterness and disappointment into one another’s faces. Sometimes we flung things or smashed things, and once or twice we even began to hit out at each other, clawing at each other’s cheeks, pulling each other’s hair. Mostly, though, we just argued and shouted, on and on, until we were sufficiently exhausted to crawl off to sleep for a few hours, or at least lie down and try to sleep, in separate beds as far apart as possible, before resuming battle again the next day. It was horrible, sickening, terrifying, and it went on for several weeks, bizarrely interspersed with ordinary things like work, and walking the dog, and putting out the bins. And still neither of us made the decision to leave.
One Sunday morning we were sitting at our kitchen table, fighting as usual, and Josie had embarked on a long litany of my faults and shortcomings over many years.
‘… and you’re selfish, Bob. You’re selfish and self-righteous and unbelievably self-centred. You act like you’re the only person in the world with —’
‘Oh come on, not all this again. You know I could say exactly the same things about —’
‘Excuse me, Bob, I haven’t finished. You act like you’re the only one with feelings, the only one with legitimate explanations. There’s always a perfectly good reason for everything you do wrong. It’s always someone else’s fault, and nearly always mine. When you shagged that poor silly secretary and broke her heart, it was because I wasn’t giving you good enough sex. When you went storming out in a sulk, leaving me to deal with the house and kids, it was because I was creating an atmosphere which you couldn’t be expected to tolerate. But I’m not allowed an excuse, am I? Every possible explanation I offer for what I do, you dismiss out of hand. In fact, you provide counter-evidence. You quote conversations and precedents from years and decades ago. You cite your so-called friends, who you’ve discussed me with in detail, and agree with you entirely. You prove beyond all reasonable doubt that you are entirely blameless, entirely virtuous, entirely and tragically misunderstood. You turn everything back onto —’
‘What, and you don’t do the —?’
Josie’s eyes flashed warningly. ‘I haven’t finished, Bob. You’ll get your say when I’m done.’
I shrugged.
‘You turn everything back on to me,’ Josie persisted. ‘I hardly dare to say anything even slightly critical because I know quite well that, even if it’s just me asking you if you could empty the dishwasher sometimes, or if you could turn off the tap properly so it doesn’t drip, I’ll end up getting a two hour lecture.’
And then she stopped, abruptly and, to me, entirely unexpectedly, because her tirade had sounded as if it had enough momentum to continue for some time yet. ‘Okay, I’m done,’ she said. ‘Now it’s your turn.’
Well, naturally I’d been preparing my riposte while she was talking. It was to have been constructed in my now-classic three-pronged format. Prong One: what she said about my behaviour was completely untrue. Prong Two: even if it was true, it was equally true of her and probably more so. Prong Three: she was to blame for my bad behaviour anyway, because she’d pushed me into a position where I had no choice.
It was all very familiar and well-tried stuff, and I could almost have delivered it in my sleep. But, unusually, I found myself hesitating. I couldn’t help noticing, you see, that she’d rather anticipated Prong Three. And more unusually, I couldn’t help feeling she had a point. True, she sometimes did engage in tactics that weren’t so very different to mine, but that didn’t actually alter the truth of what she said. I was self-centred. I was indeed unbelievably self-righteous, ‘unbelievably’ in a quite literal sense, actually, for even I didn’t believe in the claims to righteousness which I habitually made. (After all, if I did believe them, why was I always so desperately defensive?) So not only was Prong Three (her being to blame for my faults) a non-starter, but Prong One (me not having any faults) wasn’t really going to hold water either. And that being so, wasn’t Prong Two (her faults being as bad as, or worse than, mine) a little shaky also? Couldn’t she quite justifiably claim that some of her own apparent bad behaviour was simply a necessary defence?
I opened my mouth to speak, found I had nothing to say, and closed it again. I still felt angry with her, still felt like the victim of an injustice, but I somehow couldn’t find the formula that would clearly establish this to be the case. I stood up and picked up the kettle with the idea of buying time by making another drink. Then I realised that the very idea of one more cup of tea was making me feel sick, and laid it down again unfilled.
‘I don’t know about you, but I could do with a break. Why don’t we take the dog over to the marsh for a couple of hours?’
•
I was referring to a big saltmarsh, only about six miles from where we lived. It stretches for more than twenty miles along the coast, and is about a mile across at its widest points, with at least another mile of sand stretching out beyond it at low tide. Josie and I and our mongrel Rex had known it all our lives. It’s a strange in-between place that’s neither land nor sea, where you can see larks next to seagulls, flowering plants alongside crabs, and sheep grazing on the banks of creeks where trilobite-like crustaceans meander through the brackish water, as if still living in the Cambrian age. Behind the marsh is the true land where farms and villages sit among green and partly wooded hills. Beyond it is a wide sandy beach, with the waves and surf you find on other coasts. But the sea is so far out that, when you stand at the very edge of the true land, it’s completely out of sight, and there’s only marsh in front of you.
We parked our car and walked straight out onto the partly boardwalked track that crossed the marsh to the beach, Rex bounding ahead of us as usual to find things to sniff, eat and piss on. We’d normally have checked the tides, but with all the emotion and turbulence we hadn’t given that any thought, and had been striding along oblivi
ously for half a mile before it occurred to us that the tide was coming in very fast, and that it was going to be a particularly high one.
It was Josie who noticed it first. ‘The sea’s coming in, Bob. Do you think we ought to turn back?’
By this time the beach in the distance was already covered by sea, along with the outer part of the marsh itself. We’d been so stunned and preoccupied by our own little drama that this entire vista, familiar as it was, had barely impinged on us, other than by providing a soothing background to our troubled thoughts, like a poultice on an infected wound. But now, as we belatedly took stock of what was actually happening in the world beyond our skins, we could see the water rushing in through the creeks all round us, sucking and gurgling as it came.
‘Christ, yes, and we’d better be quick.’ Now I thought about it, I vaguely remembered hearing something about an unusually high tide this weekend. ‘Jesus, look at it! It’s coming closer just while we watch.’
The tide didn’t normally cover the marsh but it happened from time to time, and when it did, the very shallow gradient meant that the sea came in extremely quickly: every vertical inch it rose took it many yards forward horizontally. We called Rex and started back at a jog. By the time we were halfway to the true dry land, the creeks near us were already overflowing. When we finally reached it, we’d been wading for some time through seawater that came well over our knees, holding hands to support one another. Rex had had to swim.
It was actually quite fun, once we knew we weren’t going to drown, and the two of us were laughing like kids by the time we stepped out onto the little strip of grass and shrubs that divided the marsh from the fields. While Rex shook brackish water all over us, we pulled off our shoes to empty them, wringing out our socks and laying them out on a gorse bush to dry. Then we stood and looked back out at the expanse of water that now completely covered our path. It was pretty impressive. Just in the time since we’d parked our car, almost all of our familiar marsh had been submerged, with only here or there a dry patch standing out above it as a sort of low greengrey island.
And right then, quite suddenly, as I was standing there and taking all this in, I realised I was seeing the moon again. I mean I was really seeing it in the way that I’d done in that quarry at fifteen, with my weed-befuddled friends. It was an overcast day and the moon itself was completely out of sight, but the tangible evidence of its presence and scale was right there in front of us. For it was the moon that had covered these two miles of sand and marsh by dragging the entire North Sea towards itself. It was the moon that had forced us to run. It was the moon that could well have drowned us, if we’d got as far as the beach before we noticed the tide.
And that was only the beginning of it. For in fact the moon had formed this entire landscape. This enormous no man’s land between sea and land, on which all those countless living things out there depended, only existed at all because of the moon. All the denizens of the marsh and the beach beyond, the gulls, the oyster-catchers, the crabs, and all the millions of worms and molluscs and crustaceans that waited in the mud for the tides: they were all creatures of the moon. The very bodies of many of them took the form they did because of the existence of that colossal sphere of rock that passed over them day after day, bringing them new nourishment each time by pulling the ocean upwards and letting it fall.
I turned towards Josie. I was so excited by this notion that I’d quite forgotten our troubles for the moment, and simply wanted to share with her what I’d seen. But poor Josie didn’t know that, and I saw her face flinch in anticipation of some new onslaught. We’d become used to moving to and fro between the business of everyday life and our ancient quarrel and she’d simply assumed that our moment of laughter had passed, and that I was starting up the fight all over again.
‘Don’t look so worried,’ I told her. ‘I was only going to say something about the tide.’
‘Oh, okay. Yes, it’s quite something, isn’t it, when it comes in like this?’
‘Yes, I …’ I looked down into her so-familiar face, wary and exhausted, every trace already gone of her recent laughter. I’d been about to tell her about the moon and the marsh and about that time in the quarry when I was fifteen years old, but now something even stranger was happening. I was seeing Josie. I was really seeing this person – dogged, stoical and wry – who’d been living alongside me now for nearly forty years. As I stood looking down at her, and she up at me, I wondered if I’d ever really seen her before.
‘Remember what you said before we came out?’ I asked her.
She was real, I was thinking! She was separate from me! Yet somehow we were together, both of us in the same world, standing here face to face under the sky.
Josie sighed. ‘I know it’s your turn to speak now, Bob, and I know some of the things I said were probably unfair, but could you possibly bear to leave it until we get home?’
‘No, listen,’ I said. I offered my hand to her, and she very tentatively and reluctantly took it, watching my face all the while, as if expecting some kind of trick. ‘Listen, dearest,’ I told her. ‘I don’t want to argue now, and I don’t need to talk about it. I just wanted you to know that I’ve thought about what you said, and it wasn’t unfair at all. In fact, quite the contrary, everything you said was completely true.’
She held onto my hand, searching my face uncertainly with those wary, weary eyes. And then suddenly she burst into tears.
I put my arms round her at once and, after a moment of holding back, she melted against me, heaving with sobs. I was weeping too. I called her sweetheart, darling, precious, love. I kissed her on the back of her head. And then she lifted her face towards mine and we kissed one another. We kissed again and again, with lips and tongues, smearing the slippery mixture of her tears and mine all over each other’s faces.
I suppose some couples might say of such a moment that it was as if all the years had vanished away and they were right back at the beginning. But our beginning had never been like this. There was no point, not one, in all those years since that crappy little rock concert in King’s Lynn at which we’d ever been truly together. We’d been like two creeks side by side that had never quite touched. We’d always been waiting for the tide.
Sky
Jeremy Burnet’s neighbours were concerned about him, and the woman who phoned the police said she was calling on behalf of them all. They were fairly sure Mr Burnet was in his house – his car was parked in the street and his bike locked in its usual place – but he hadn’t been sighted since a Saturday afternoon just under four weeks ago, when some of them had seen him going out in his car and returning with items from a builder’s merchant, power tools and such, although there’d been no sign or sound of any work going on in the house either before then or since. Mr Burnet had looked as if he hadn’t washed or shaved for weeks. The woman who called the police had tried to greet him – she’d known him a number of years – but he’d just stared right through her as if he didn’t know she was there. And he’d always been such a tidy man, too, the sort that didn’t like anything out of place, and yet the garden was now completely overgrown, and the living room curtains at the front had been drawn for months, day and night, while the bedroom curtains were never closed at all.
What had finally prompted this call, though, was that one of the other neighbours had been contacted by Mr Burnet’s elderly mother who was too frail to visit him for herself. She said she was worried because her son never phoned any more, and never picked up when she tried to call him. And surely, said the neighbour who’d rung the police, even if Mr Burnet had somehow managed to slip away without any of them noticing, he’d have let his own mother know where he was going?
Two police officers went to Jeremy Burnet’s house, a policewoman and a policeman. Their names were Cheryl and Pradeep. They rang the doorbell for several minutes, and then called through the letterbox. ‘Hello, Mr Burnet? Are you there? It’s the police. Could we have a word? You’re not in trouble of any kind, b
ut we’re just checking everything’s alright. Your neighbours are worried for you.’
There was no answer, though, not even that indefinable feeling of presence, that sense of something listening deep inside the house, that in Cheryl’s experience you tended to get when someone was in but didn’t want to be intruded upon. ‘Either he’s not there or he’s not well at all,’ she decided. Pradeep nodded. He was the younger of the two by some years, and tended to defer to his colleague’s wider experience.
Cheryl was about to make a call to the station about a warrant to break down the door, when one of the watching neighbours remembered he had a key. Jeremy had given it to him one hot summer several years ago, he said, ‘before all of this started’, so he could come in and water Mr Burnet’s patio plants for him when he was taking a holiday in Spain with his then-girlfriend. Mr Burnet had asked the neighbour to keep it in case he ever locked himself out.
The key turned in the lock, and the two police officers entered, stepping over a drift of mail. The door of the living room was open. There was a cream-coloured sofa and chairs, and expensive-looking curtains drawn across the window. The light was switched on, though it was the middle of the day. However, what they immediately noticed was the wide-open hatch in the middle of the floor, from which a rug had been rolled back and shoved aside. There was a concrete staircase descending inside it, and light shining up from below. It was a very odd place to put a set of cellar stairs, but there they were, and it seemed exceedingly probable that they would find Mr Burnet at the bottom of them.
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