by Emma Timpany
I didn’t go. I didn’t tell him I wasn’t going to. I just didn’t turn up. My mum didn’t know to take me because I didn’t ask her, although I did think of blaming her, or her car, or my sister or something if he asked me why the next day. When I was eating my tea I thought about him sitting there, next to a laid place, maybe even with toad-in-the-hole on the plate, my toad-in-the-hole, all plump and puffy. It’s lucky I didn’t go, as I felt sick all night long.
But he didn’t ask me. The next day at school. He didn’t ask me and he didn’t really talk to me any more. Or save me a space in the TV room. He didn’t play Bulldog either. And he started coming in less and less.
At secondary school, he was in Geevor and I was in Coates so I didn’t see him much. Sometimes in the corridor, sometimes waiting outside the science block. I would smile at him but he would look right through me. He lost his hair, I noticed that. Everyone noticed and everyone talked about it. Then Mrs Harrison came into tutor group – or did she call an assembly? – and told us to sit down and all be quiet and listen because she had sad news. ‘Poorly,’ she said, which I remember thinking was an odd choice of word, because it made it sound like he had food poisoning or a nasty cold. And they don’t make you lose your hair.
Debbie suggested making him a big card and getting everyone in the school to sign it. Her voice was wobbling a bit and Anna was crying.
He died a few weeks later. There was another assembly. Debbie didn’t even get to give him the card. They played ‘Always Look on the Bright Side of Life’ at his funeral. Everyone was crying then, even the teachers. I kept my chin on my chest so my hair hung right over my eyes, but I could still see his coffin as they carried it out. It was really small. I’m not even sure I’m remembering any of this right, or if I’m just making up the details so it feels more meaningful.
I don’t even like toad-in-the-hole anyway.
It’s not just running in graveyards. Sometimes I spit too. When I’m running I mean. Because my mouth feels full and I can’t breathe and so I spit to clear it all out. I bet Debbie and Joanne and Anna have never spat in a graveyard.
ALICE
I WAS twenty-two when my boss died. I was working in London but travelling back almost every weekend. Itching for that first glimpse of the sea at Teignmouth, straining my neck as we crossed the Tamar to see the sign that told me I was home.
She was difficult. No, she was a nightmare. She would tell me that leaving on time meant I wasn’t dedicated. That I wasn’t cut out for this job. That I should just learn to apply myself. She was twenty-seven. I would watch people subtly shaking their heads in meetings after she spoke or smirking at each other when they heard her on the phone. Everyone thought it. Though no one said it in the church, to her parents, or her fiancé, of course. Once we heard the news, everyone was kind and nice and made her out to be someone she wasn’t. People cried then, too. In the office, when they found out. I just sat with my head down, hair covering my eyes. I think I might have smiled when Emma told me. I didn’t mean to. It just slipped out. I don’t know why. I wasn’t happy. I wasn’t anything.
She took me into the stairwell between the two floors. It was a strange place to be told something like that. Not really anywhere. I was expecting to be reprimanded for watching Breakfast at Tiffany’s on my desk TV again, instead of the network’s own channel. But there was no scolding. Instead she just looked at me. Her face was flat and grey and her eyes were like saucers. Talking to me was the first thing she did when she got off the call. She touched my arm. For too long. Her tongue stuck to the roof of her mouth as she spoke. Neither of us knew what we should do.
It was DVT that did it. On the way back from Banff. Alice had broken her leg skiing (which I had been so excited about as it meant she wouldn’t be coming into the office for weeks) and they’d told her she couldn’t fly. But she demanded to board.
Her fiancé found her on the floor of the bathroom when he came home from work. The clot had worked its way up from her calf to her brain. When the coroner’s report came out her face was on the front of all the papers. Because she was only twenty-seven. And her parents were suing the airline.
The ceremony was so long. Catholic. It was raining, I remember that. Someone slipped off the pavement outside the church and had to go to hospital. We all wore black and we all went to the pub after. I left when people starting toasting her.
I had to call all her contacts. And have her email cancelled. And clear out her desk drawers. They smelled of her. There was her brush, still thick with her hair, her perfume, her copy of Summer Brides with pages folded down. Michael came in to collect the box. I couldn’t look at him. He said she always talked about me, said I was great to work with. I knew he was lying. I bet he didn’t even know my name. People said I was so brave and so capable, because I just kept on doing things, because I didn’t let it get to me. But what else do you do in a situation like that? Life goes on.
Life goes on, they say. And I suppose it does. It always did. Apart from last night. Apart from this morning. Sat here, with four other women. All waiting. None of us feel brave right now.
CRAIG
HE WAS the hardest. Because of how it finished with us and how he never really accepted it had and how he was a big part of my life for so long. With Craig I actually cried. I didn’t do it to make myself fit in, or hide away so no one could see my face. I put the phone down on his best friend and I ran from the attic office I was in at the time. I ran down to the very end of the pier and let the wind blow the hair into my eyes and my mouth and I swore into the choppy waves and it carried across the estuary, getting lost in the salt and the spray. I cried and I shouted and thrashed at the railings. But not for him, or his mum, or his little brother. I cried because it was absurd. It was pointless and ridiculous and such a waste for anyone to go like that.
He was hit by a lorry on a road in Thailand. A busy road, so busy they left safety flags by the side of it for pedestrians to carry so the traffic would see them as they crossed. But the traffic didn’t see Craig. Or his girlfriend. The truck hit them at eighty miles an hour. ‘They wouldn’t have known what was happening. They wouldn’t have felt it.’ But we do. We are left to imagine.
So I was crying for that, too. Crying for the scar it would leave on everyone who knew him and the magnitude of a memory like that, which refuses to be let go of. I was swearing into the waves because I thought I had got away. From him, from London, from all of it. I was back home for good. I woke up to the sound of seagulls not sirens. I had a new life. I swam at the beach after work. I ran along the coast path to Swanpool and up, up, up. I didn’t want this. To have this. But there it was. A phone call. A lorry. And no way back.
I cried then. I cried on the pier and I cried at home and I cried as I looked through old photographs of us travelling together to send to his mum. And it felt false and selfish, like every tear was a lie running down my cheeks, giving me away. But maybe that’s how grief is. Maybe everyone is crying for themselves. Or hiding how they feel. Or wishing they would feel something more.
1/4
I AM crying now. Sitting, with my green folder on my knees. My legs are shaking. They do that when I am anxious. Though I don’t know what I’m anxious for. There is no chance of good news here. I know what’s happened. So I won’t second-guess myself or fake it or think what other people would want me to do or say. I can’t feel any more than I do now. I have felt so much in the last twenty-four hours I am still aching from it.
And yes, I am crying for me. And it is selfish. But that is okay. One, two, three, four of us sit there waiting to see the nurse. Waiting for a cold, intrusive scan to pass its verdict. I reach into my pocket for a rag of tissue. Look out the window. The seagulls are circling in the thermals, riding them up, up, up until they are just tiny dots against the infinite sky.
I know I am the one in my four. I hope these other women aren’t the one in their fours as well.
Tonight I am going to go for a run.
&nb
sp; THE MAPLE IS IN BLOSSOM
CATHY GALVIN
ON THE ten to ten from Liskeard I remembered the dawn light from your window, jackdaws, a tree breathing in and I told you it was a while since I’d looked at a tree that way. Told you about the blossom on the Canada maple from the window in the house I had sold, all it had breathed on me and my children gone. We grabbed coffee, Americano, fresh beans, and you were chatting about some sort of female synchronicity but I wasn’t listening. The rains came down and I was thinking about Edward Thomas and wondered what trees he had seen when he made love on Wimbledon Common to a wife who could not hold onto him. ‘Was yours the face that launched a thousand ships,’ you joked, your mouth full of muesli and milk. But I couldn’t forget that tree, once remembered. How I had once been in another bed. Your mobile went. You were saying, ‘You have somebody really on the edge of something,’ to who knows who. I took out the mirror, the one you gave me, automatically applied Winterberry, saw the signs: the last one please turn off the lights. Made to go. I know – we will meet soon. They’ve planted a new sapling in the street outside the place I live now, just a few buds. Looking to the North Star, rooted in litter. From your window, the tree is bone but holds birds. From mine, no birds can be seen. And on the Launceston road, children grown, the maple is in blossom.
THAT SAME SEA
ADRIAN MARKLE
WE SAT on the first-floor balcony of the holiday let that looked down over the village from the hill on the east. I looked south, to the sea, and sometimes back east, towards home. She looked west, over the village, maybe hunting among the rooftops for the house she’d grown up in.
She had tea and I had coffee. Neither of us ate. I still felt delicate, and it was too late now for breakfast anyway. I didn’t think the coffee was that great, but I was still mossy-tongued from the night before. I squinted against the sun splashing off the water, still distant but coming in, she’d assured me. She always talked about how suddenly the tide came in here. But for the moment, the boats in the little harbour all lay awkwardly on their sides in the sand, frayed green ropes trailing off limply to wherever. I picked up the paper to shield my eyes.
The front page of the newspaper showed a picture of Brighton Beach, packed shoulder to shoulder with pale, British beachgoers. ‘Millions Flock to Brighton to Escape Summer Heatwave,’ it said.
‘They should just come here,’ I said. The little village, the one she’d grown up in, Gorran Haven, was busy with tourists – like myself, I suppose – but not ‘millions’ busy.
‘They don’t know,’ she said.
‘What don’t they know?’
‘About this. Not really. God’s own country. But people don’t understand the difference. This is a nice place. A really nice place. But they just see a beach.’
I was surprised by how much she seemed to care for this village, how quickly her old accent was reasserting itself. She never talked about home much, but as soon as we’d booked this weekend she seemed to grow more impassioned about it with each passing week.
‘Why not?’ I asked.
‘Because they’re incomers.’
‘Like me.’
‘Like you.’ She winked.
‘You’re enjoying this.’
‘I am. I’ve had years of you teasing me about not knowing this or that about the city, not knowing the best route on the tube. Now it’s your turn to be a little out of place. But it’s okay. You’re with me.’
‘You’re not exactly a local yourself any more.’
‘Shush. It doesn’t leave you. And I’m local enough to know where the good beach is.’
We stood and collected our kit from the foot of the bed and walked past the main beach, jammed with tourists and their tents and chairs and windbreaks and all sorts of other beach furniture, and off up the narrow dirt path that wound its way along the coast, up and over one of the two tall hills that penned in her little village.
The path was uneven and hard, like concrete, and I struggled at first, but she was surefooted, and soon I was hurrying to catch up.
‘Good to be back?’ I called, hoping to slow her. It worked. We’d got in the night before and then immediately drank too much. Today was her first real day here in years.
She answered with a grunting noise that I couldn’t decipher and we continued on in the quiet, slower now – her initial enthusiasm seemingly lessened – up the path.
We crested the hill, and the wind hit us in a way that I had not been prepared for. It didn’t get windy like that in the city; it didn’t have time to build up speed. She stretched out her arms to feel it blow across her bare skin. Her long black hair lit up and tore and twisted wild in the wind, tangling and untangling. I felt like I could already see that copper rising, that shade that came out in her hair with enough sun, and the pink that rose on her cheeks – even though our holiday was only just a few hours old. She wore the weather on her skin. It got into her and stayed long after any evidence of good weather would have faded from me.
After she’d had her fill, she turned and set off again, me trailing quite contentedly behind. The great rolling hills of close-cropped grass were to our right, and to our left was a steep-then-vertical drop off to the sea.
‘It’s gorse.’ She pointed to some yellow-flowered bushes that grew abundantly between us and the sea. ‘Rose is Cornish for gorse, so this is what the Roseland means.’
‘Oh. I’d have preferred actual roses.’
‘Quiet. This place is magical. Those are ferns,’ she said. ‘Fiddlehead ferns, maybe.’
She knew I liked hearing things like this. The ferns grew thick, carpet-like, a woven green mass that obscured the actual solid footing of the hill. It was just us, and then the ferns, and then the sea.
‘And that’s cow parsley,’ she said. It grew tall, taller than her in some cases, and its stalks held up little umbrellas of white flowers. ‘Sheep go crazy for it.’
‘Sheep?’
‘Yeah, sheep. Look, they’ve grazed down the field on the other side of us.’
‘Can I see one?’
‘I don’t know.’ She laughed. ‘Can you?’
‘I mean, I’ve never actually seen one before, up close.’
She shook her head. ‘City folk.’
‘Last week you drank a latte out of an avocado, and you’ve taken your cat to yoga.’
She shrugged. ‘Got to do something to make city life bearable.’
I leaned over and reached out for a burst of the flowers of the cow parsley, to get it for her, to pin it in her hair, but she followed my gaze and slapped the back of my hand.
‘Don’t,’ she said. ‘It’ll only die if you pick it. Besides, don’t lean off the path like that. Dangerous.’
We continued on around the head, with her still naming things occasionally – foxglove, blackberry brambles, ivy – until the path split, and we took the one that angled down to a long, fat curve of pebbled beach, dramatically walled in on either side by two spits of rocky headland, and populated by only a few other couples. Good to be an insider. Fuck Brighton.
‘Vault Beach,’ she said.
The path we did not take continued up along the edge of the hill, eventually passing, I now saw, a field that had sheep in it, and a part of me wished we’d gone that way.
We dropped our things and kicked off our sandals way, way back on the beach. When the tide comes in, it comes in like a flash, she’d said. Our things would be washed away before we even knew we were in danger of losing them.
By the time our toes touched the sand, the air was hot. I was already sweating and probably starting to burn. Had to be well over twenty degrees. We walked out, but not straight out, instead tracing the headland in and over and around the rocks, to which our access was granted by the still-absent tide. It had come in only so much as to wet our feet and ankles.
‘It’s the same.’ She beamed. ‘It’s all the same as I remember.’
‘What’s the sound?’ I asked. I loved to see her smile like th
at, but there was something echoing down the little cliff, a deep growl and a lighter, grinding, metallic rattle that made me nervous.
She cocked her head.
‘Chain harrow.’
I nodded. I had no idea what she was talking about, but I nodded.
‘A farmer’s driving round somewhere on a quad bike, towing a net of chain that turns over the soil.’
I nodded again.
‘Now hurry up. I’m going to show you something, if you’ll move your lazy ass!’
She ran off and I chased after and we clambered about in the shade cast by the headland, tracing, down there on the sand, roughly the same path that continued along the cliff above us.
The water was knee high now, and I splashed seawater at her as she forged ahead, the droplets falling and disappearing in her wake without her ever knowing they’d been there.
‘Look,’ she said, and I hurried to catch up. ‘The grotto!’ I could hear the memories coming back to her. She pointed to a cleft in the cliff face and turned into it. I followed her. We walked through the rock where it parted like tied-back curtains. The base of the grotto was higher than the beach we’d come from, and we were soon less than ankle deep again, spraying cloudy, silty water about us with each step.
In the recess stood a sheep, a young one, white wool and white face. It was near motionless and didn’t react to us at all.
We sidled up to the sheep, not wanting to spook it. Though it must have been able to hear the splash of our steps, it didn’t run. Didn’t even so much as look, just stood, waiting.
‘Is this …?’ I started to ask.
‘No, not normal at all,’ she said, and she moved toward it, then reached back and grabbed my hand and we approached together. It was cold in there.