by Lucy Wood
‘It’s blocked.’
‘It’s always blocked.’
He turns and looks down the track. ‘It’s pouring over.’ His voice is strange, lower than she remembers; it catches in his throat as if there’s water bubbling in it.
She closes the door an inch and stands behind it.
He pulls his hood down further. ‘I can’t do it by myself.’
She sees that his spade is clagged with dirt. ‘You’ve been trying to fix it?’ she says.
He turns again and looks down towards the ditch. He clutches the spade. The skin on his fingers is damp and crinkled. He opens his mouth and it looks, for a moment, as if a trickle of something dark comes out, but it must just be mud from his hood. He closes his mouth, swallows, and walks back onto the track. His spade scrapes on the ground. Water pours over the tops of his boots. He blurs into the rain and disappears.
She opens the door wider and stands there, looking out. She can’t really see anything except the rain. The water looks higher than usual – there’s a pool under the door already and it’s still rising. She looks back at her kitchen. The pool of water starts spreading. She unhooks her coat from the peg, pulls on her boots and gets her spade from the garage – it’s rusty and buckling but it will have to do. She steps into the water and follows him down to the ditch, bending her head against the force of the downpour. He’s walking slowly, almost bowed over, with one leg dragging. There are slabs of mud under his boots.
The ditch is overflowing fast. It’s gritty and thick and slopping out like bathwater going over the rim. He bends down and starts digging, bringing out spadefuls and throwing them over his shoulder. The ditch looks much wider than it was before. The bank has collapsed down one side, water is flooding out, and there’s mud and weeds choking everything. She leans in and digs, scooping out stones and roots. Sludge smears up her legs and hands.
After a while she notices that he keeps stopping and stretching his back. He tries to straighten it but it’s stooped, as if there’s something heavy pressing down on it. Sometimes he turns and spits behind him. His spit looks muddy. There’s mud in his teeth and under his nails. It looks like there’s water brimming under his coat.
She digs deeper, scooping out spade after spade of dirt and crushed nettles. The rain is like hands pummelling. It roars in her ears. The pile of mud is growing behind her, but the ditch is so deep and there’s so much slipped mud, it doesn’t seem like she’s even cleared half of it yet.
‘When did this happen?’ she says.
Another bit of the bank slides into the water – a chunk of clay and roots that calves off stickily.
She keeps digging and the shape of the ditch becomes clearer. It is bigger. The sides have been scraped and cleared and a channel has been dug through the bank. She digs again and finds a section of pipe that wasn’t there before. It definitely wasn’t there before. She digs around it. The pipe is long. It’s been laid in the channel and comes out onto her side of the track. Water is pouring out of it and diverting straight onto her land. She digs again. The pipe isn’t finished, but there are more sections in there ready to be joined together, and more channels that, once they’re finished, will siphon all the water off in the same direction.
She looks at his muddy coat, the mud on his spade. Suddenly she knows exactly what he’s been doing.
‘You underhanded bastard,’ she says. She clenches the spade, turns around, and raises it in the air.
He’s gone. He was standing right next to her and now there’s nothing. The rain is dark and cold. She scans the track, the field, but there’s no one there. She looks at the bank – there are no footprints where he was standing. The mud is smooth and clear, the grass is untrampled. She curses and swings her spade down deep into the water. It hits something solid. It doesn’t feel like rock, it feels softer than that, but harder than the mud.
She wades into the ditch to get a better look. The water sucks at her boots. She digs in again and hits the same thing. It’s down underneath where the bank has collapsed. It’s big. She prods carefully, loosening, lifting the mud around it. She gets her spade in one more time but can’t prise it loose. She kneels down and puts her arms into the water. It’s deep. It comes up past her elbows. The chill comes up past her neck. She reaches down and feels around and her fingers catch at something. She grabs it and pulls. It’s heavy, and it seems to be caught down there, wedged in under the piles of slipped mud. She pulls harder, leaning back with all her weight. The thing shifts. She reaches down, untangles a root, and moves some hard lumps of clay. She has a handful of dark, greasy cloth. She pulls again and steps back and more of it slides out.
Boots appear, then legs, a mac that’s sopping and daubed in mud, a hood that’s pulled down low over a wiry beard.
She picks up her spade and stands there for a long time. She looks down at the pipe, at the new channels cut into the bank, and the water pouring out across her land. She looks down at him. There are three deep spade marks – one in the top of his head, one in his chest, one in his thigh. His skin is as waxy as when you dig up a potato. He’s sodden and cold and his teeth are gritted in his jaw, almost, maybe, as if he’s grinning up at her.
Well, that’s what she says happened anyway.
A Year of Buryings
January
The first was Lily Ennis and she did not go peacefully. It was just as the old year slipped into the new one and she clung on, gripping the chair. She’d always thought that the next year would be different – her son would phone, people would visit, someone would beg her to stop smoking. After all, it wasn’t up to her to do everything, was it? She clung on. She waited. She’s still waiting, actually. When the phone rings, there’s a dry intake of breath. In the mornings, there are dents in the arms of the chair.
Next was Riley – sometimes, out of the corner of your eye, you might see him wandering around, talking to himself, wringing his hands. Maybe it’s because of the things he did, or maybe it’s because of the things he didn’t. There he goes now, with his head down, hurrying past.
It’s hard to keep track sometimes, what with all the comings, what with all the goings. Every bloody year it’s like this – everything changing, everything staying the same.
Violet always swore she’d be kinder.
Lenny always said he’d fix that loose rung on his ladder.
Selwyn made a thousand resolutions. He was going to see an iceberg. He was going to settle down. He would never be late again. You can see his car on its side in the hedge. In spring, it gets covered over when the leaves grow thick. In winter, it shows through again. Thistles are growing in the tyres. There’s a bird’s nest in the exhaust.
And then there was that man at the crossroads, what was his name? He didn’t make any resolutions at all. For him it was better if nothing changed. He’d fallen in love once and look how that turned out. One year blurred into the next, keeping himself to himself, following his own strange routines. He lived by the bus shelter (there’s no buses, the timetable’s ten years old; there’s just a mouldy armchair someone dragged in to help with the waiting). Every year the nettles come up, every year they die back down. He was keeled over in the verge for a month up there before anyone found him. He was up there for a month listening to a badger scratching up his bones.
February
That’s the thing – there’s a constant shifting of earth round here. It’s hard to keep track of it. Bulldozers, cement lorries, gardens ripped out for parking. Houses go up, houses come down. I’m supposed to be remembering, I’m supposed to be getting it all down, but all I can hear is digging and hammering.
Now someone’s tapping on windows. Who is it? It’s Jameson with his stick, out in the rain again, trying to remember where he used to live.
Wanda tried not to remember. She lay in bed listening to the young people speeding along the top road, doing two-wheelers round the bends. She’d done it herself a long time ago. She’d clipped someone in the dark. God, who was it? She ha
dn’t stopped. She hadn’t told anyone. The beat of the engines kept her awake all night. Finally she got up and climbed out of the window. She stood in the road with her arm raised to slow them down. The headlights passed straight through her.
Bradley gritted his teeth and swerved. He crawled out of the windscreen without looking back. He was only nineteen. Now he hangs around on empty farms and outside pubs. No one wants to be the one to say it, but things haven’t turned out too differently for him after all.
It turned out Acer had a flair for making enemies.
It turned out everyone was a little bit in love with Annie.
Franklin, meanwhile, died of heartbreak. Don’t let anyone try to tell you it was a stroke, or angina. He had all the years mapped out, and then he woke up and his girlfriend’s shoes had gone, and her coat, and that suitcase she’d been keeping under the bed. He wrote letters and phoned her about a hundred times a day. He hung around outside her house until they made him stop. There’s a holly tree growing out of him now. It’s already covered in dark berries. When you walk past it reaches out and tries to snag your clothes.
In the next row across, there’s a couple who’d been married over seventy years. They were buried side by side, as close as it was possible to get. If you look carefully you might see a gap appearing, hardly anything, a millimetre, then another millimetre – the kind of thing the gravedigger, a man of geography, would put down to shifting bedrock, or the damn moles, or one of those sinkholes that may one day open up and swallow everything.
March
The cliffs crumbled. A pockmark eroded into a crack, the crack widened until a small overhang broke off and shattered on the beach, exposing smooth shale underneath; the disgruntled fossil of something that remembered better days, when this place was a vast lake next to a mountain range. No one really noticed.
No one noticed the woman going in for a swim either. It was the last day of her holiday and she had that not-quite-left, not-quite-here-any-more feeling. Her bags were packed in the car. The cleaner was sweeping her away. The rip took her out almost to Lundy.
It finally gave back Mr Edwards, though, about forty years too late. There he is in the shallows – washing in and out, thin as a strand of kelp, practically see-through actually. Not a kind man. No one wants to be the one to say it. But maybe a changed man, what with the way the water has smoothed out his bones, the way those barnacles have found the gaps between his fingers.
When Jamie Silver washed off his boat in a storm he made sure he wouldn’t be found. He was a claustrophobic man – he didn’t want a wooden box, or the hard, packed earth. He’d survived a war and three divorces. Someone had once hit him in the dark with their car. He knew the currents very well; he knew the deepest channels and the rocks he could snag on to. He knew how far he needed to go so that no one could bring him in, or fix him down, or say his life had been this or his life had been that. As far as he was concerned people could look, the meddling, good-hearted bastards, but thank God they’d never find him.
April
In April there was no one.
A dolphin was stranded on the stones. There was no one around apart from the fossil and the fossil didn’t give a shit. It had seen it all before. The dolphin started drying out. It forgot what being a dolphin was, until the tide came back in and it swam away and remembered.
A gun went off but I don’t think anything’s come of it yet.
Someone else came down to retire but I don’t think anything’s come of that yet either.
It’s hard to keep track though. Another supermarket went up practically overnight. Someone built a house in their back garden. The mud got churned, there was nowhere for the rain to go. The last lumps of snow melted and mixed with the soil to create a sort of slush – not liquid exactly, not exactly solid ground.
Lyn slipped into the river on her way home at night. Water poured into her shoes. It was very dark, very cold, and something heavy came down, like a lid closing over her. But she knew she’d get out. She’d had her palm read once and they’d said that her life would be full of tall, exciting men, and she hadn’t met any of them yet.
Lenny’s nephew almost used the same bloody ladder.
Yardley woke up during his funeral, banging etc.
No one knows what’s happened to Lonnie.
Lizzie Wheeler found out about the radioactive properties of granite. How the radon leaked out every day, every minute. How it was odourless and colourless. She started seeing clouds of gas hanging in the air. When she found a lump in her side, nestled under her ribs, she knew exactly what it was. The doctor referred her to the hospital for tests. She felt the lump every day, got to know its precise dimensions, its peculiar firmness. Then, one day, it disappeared. Reabsorbed, the doctor said, shaking her head. On her way home, Lizzie saw a cloud of gas right in front of her. She shivered and walked the long way around it.
And did you hear about Pinky Rowe, who walked unscathed in that lightning storm, carrying a metal umbrella?
May
In May the rain came. You know the kind – warmish, dampish, turning everything into pulpy paper. There’s nowhere to go in rain like that. Nothing to do. You suddenly realise the long distances. There aren’t many trees to hide under.
In Mikey’s house they found washing stolen off the neighbour’s line – socks, a nightie, three soft pillowcases.
In Sal’s there was a mace under the bed.
June
Someone’s watching out of that window. There’s a face, too blurry to properly see. It’s sort of mottled, sort of furtive-looking. Whoever it is they’re just standing there, watching, listening, even though someone’s come in and taken away the furniture, even though the curtains are down and the electricity’s been switched off. Look – their face is pressed right up to the glass, even though the carpets have been rolled, even though someone’s taken away the plates, and the chairs, and letters are banking up on the floor.
Ira didn’t take any notice of anyone. Other people and their troubles dripped off him like rain from a waterproof coat. No one’s judging – it would probably be blissful really, to not hear things, to not know things. Apart from the fact that he missed what everyone was saying about the eroding cliff path, but there are swings, aren’t there, and there are roundabouts.
Look, there goes Maurice again, circling the fields, ripping up handfuls of daisies. He does that every day without stopping. See the way he’s rushing, see the way his hands are shaking. It makes you think he must have done something terrible, the way he leaves flowers like that shoved under his wife’s door.
Leslie empties a bottle of Scotch every week on the ground where her father’s buried. The one time she forgot the grass withered up and turned as dry as ashes.
Which reminds me of something – what is it? Why’s it always up to me to remember everything?
That’s it. Mrs Edwards is still in the glove compartment of her daughter’s car, bumping softly every time it turns. She’s waiting to be let go of, waiting, finally, for when there’ll be no one orbiting around her like strange, lost planets.
Whereas someone who shall not be named (that old lech) has been shoved unceremoniously, and for all time, into the back of a cupboard.
We should spare a thought for Fuller too, shouldn’t we, who never got around to arranging his affairs. He always thought he had more time. He could have been scattered over the water, drifting with the seagulls, being pulled in all directions by the wind. Instead he’s on two different mantelpieces in hot front rooms, getting polished every day. It’s not so bad actually, except for the way the clocks tick slightly out of sync.
July
The rain turned into a heatwave overnight. The sand roasted. Mud dried for the first time in years. A gorse fire broke out. There was a landslip and the fossil fell onto the beach and was covered over again by stones, just as it had started to get used to things.
Jack Gilbert and Mitch Mitchell were old enemies. Neither of them could rememb
er why. Their farms shared a border and they let out each other’s animals and lit dirty bonfires. So when smoke came up from Mitch’s place, Jack didn’t do anything about it. He went back to his house and watched from the window. The smoke thickened and hung in the air. It didn’t smell like one of his normal bonfires – it smelled like there was petrol in it. Mitch had probably left an old can lying around in the yard. He was, and always had been, a complacent man. Jack went to bed. He woke up the next morning with the taste of smoke in his mouth. It was in his hair and his clothes and now, according to him, it won’t come out.
Someone got stabbed with a kitchen knife. Someone else got poisoned or something. My God, it’s not like the old days round here is it; it’s not like those times you could keep your door unlocked. What with people wandering around with blood in their mouths and did you hear that shouting, that choking? I’m just saying.
Two sisters lived in flats one above the other. The smallest noises set them off. They heard each other’s TVs. They heard curtains opening and scraping across their runners. They heard each other’s breathing and the sounds they made when they were eating. The sister upstairs banged her feet on the floor. The sister downstairs climbed a ladder and banged with her hands. Their hearts went on practically the same day, but they’re still doing it – banging and cursing – and neither will be the one that stops first.
There was that woman who put a curse on her mother-in-law, wasn’t there? Of course, no one can prove it.
No one can prove who started the rift between the Randalls either. They’re a big, sprawling family and even they keep forgetting who’s aligned with who. There are cousins who don’t speak to cousins, aunts who don’t speak to nieces. The grandfather can’t go to the cinema any more because his grandson works there, even though he used to love the maroon seats, the musty smell of popcorn. One of the nephews was tiling his roof early in the morning, before the heat set in, when he fell off. There was no one around except his uncle, who was in the next field. The nephew didn’t shout to him for help. He couldn’t bring himself to do it. If only he’d just shouted. But you know what these things are like between families, don’t you – the way they’re deep and gleaming, like tin lodes.