“And no sign of foxes?”
“Only that one,” Mary laughed, pointing at the cushion.
“Michelle’s obsessed,” Eric called from the hall. “She’s going to organize a mission to hunt them out. I told her about the mess outside yours last week, so I’m afraid you’re on the committee.”
“Did you have a good time?” Mary asked.
“Lovely, thank you.”
“Even if Michelle did check her phone every ten minutes in case you were trying to call.” Eric had come into the lounge now. “Seriously, Mary—thanks. We needed it.” He rubbed Michelle’s back. “Will you come over the weekend after next? Off duty, this time. We’re going to have a barbecue, invite a few friends round.”
Mary saw Michelle yawn then, and Eric took it as a cue too. “You know, the really great thing about living next door to the babysitter is that you don’t have to drive her home.”
She laughed. “I charge mileage though, and I’m going the long way.”
* * *
FOR THE SECOND time that evening, Mary stood in the shallow porch. The sky was darkening properly now. Saturday evening; beautiful, and still so hot at 10 p.m. that you could be out in a gauzy but carefully chosen dress with nowhere to go and not look adrift. For the first time in weeks, she really wanted to be out. At the bottom of Eric and Michelle’s path, she turned right instead of left toward her own home. She passed Neville’s, the new-builds where she didn’t know the neighbors, and reached Shepherds Bridge Walk.
Cars streamed by, and she veered off at the first side street, walking parallel to her own terrace. Ashland Road was much grander than Hazel Grove. The houses along here were larger, set further back from the pavement. Some were four stories tall and, judging by the bells beside the front doors, had been divided into flats. No one was walking down here; they had already gone out. Or perhaps they were walking down her road, the straighter path to the pub and the park.
She pushed her hands into her pockets and found the second biscuit. She ate it with one hand and swung her dress with the other; the alcohol had loosened her up, she thought. Either that, or she was happy! Somewhere behind her, a front door shut. Footsteps faded in the opposite direction. These houses were the ones she would see from her place if the trees weren’t so dense. The little woodland lay behind them too, so that in effect she was making a large circle of her house and garden, pacing the circumference of her territory. Perhaps he visited here as well. She listened for him, but she could hear only the squeak of her left sandal; it had made that noise ever since she had found it in the garden.
The night was still and breezeless. All was quiet, except at the edges of her vision, where everything twitched and jangled. A shape slipped under a parked car to her left. Her eyes gave chase, but not so much as a tail could be seen. By now he could be anywhere. At the end of the street, she may as well turn on to Drovers Lane and complete the circle back home.
Perhaps because she had been looking for something in the midrange of her vision, Mary screamed when she turned the corner and came face-to-face with an imposing foreground. He, on the other hand, smiled. He appeared to have been expecting her. On her home ground, she had walked right into Mark.
CHAPTER FOUR
He had shed his winter coat. That was her first thought. His hair was shorn—not shaved, but trimmed close to his head. He was dressed for the heat, so her survey of his outfit was brief: shirt, shorts, deck shoes, no socks. Laces fastidiously bowed. The fastidiousness was the only thing that belonged to the Mark she knew. Head to toe, Mary recognized not a single item of his clothing. Then she realized that the shape inside the clothes was different too. Her eyes followed the creases that pulled across his chest in a tug of war between one beefy shoulder and the other. He had always been lean, but now a hard ridge of muscle climbed his forearm. Like a rope, she thought with a shudder. He had bought a new wardrobe and built a new body too.
She raised her eyes to his face and saw that he was watching her with a smile, and even his smile came as a shock. Maybe it was the moonlight, but his teeth appeared whiter.
“What are you doing here?” she said.
He laughed. “Hello, Mary. It’s nice to see you too.”
“What are you doing?”
His lips glistened, straining into a smile. “Five months, and that’s all you can say? Go on. Have another try.”
“You’re meant to be in Kent.”
“Yeah.” He laughed. “That’s not a whole lot better.” He gave a nervous flick of his head, as if he was still getting used to the fringe having gone.
“But you are meant to be in Kent.”
“I was in Kent,” he said.
“What do you mean, ‘was’?”
He eyed her patiently, giving her time to catch up with him. But she wasn’t trying to catch up with him. She was thinking it seemed an impossible coincidence that he should be here on this corner, just as she happened to walk around it. “Were you coming to see me?” she asked.
He pressed his lips together, trying to stop something from escaping. “I was on my way home.”
“Home? What do you mean ‘home’?”
Nothing about Mark—not his outfit, his posture, not the slant of his body on the pavement—gave any clue to his reappearance. He may as well have dropped from the sky and landed on this spot, on the very next road to her own.
“Hey, stop grimacing at me like that! You’re making me nervous,” he said.
“I’m making you nervous?” She suppressed a scoffing noise. “You’re the one who’s turned up on my doorstep.”
“Not your doorstep, though, is it?” he said calmly.
“So you were on your way home, and you just happened to be passing my road…”
He let out a long sigh. “Actually, I deliberately avoided your road.”
A street lamp flicked on over their heads, and now Mark’s skin glowed with an amber sheen. His whole person presented itself as a sort of warning light. She wondered if that was how she appeared to him, if the whites of her eyes were orange too.
“We can do better than this,” he said. “I’m going to start again. How are you, Mary?”
His arms hung loosely at his side, giving the impression of openness. His propensity to smile suggested ease. But the steel-blue eyes examining her were two circular shields, flinty flecks lodged here and there, and she knew that whatever she said would be brutely defended. He was watching for her next move.
“Where are you living?” she asked. “I think I’ve got a right to know.” Two minutes in his company and already her voice sounded feeble. But Mark chose instead to address her underlying thought. Or perhaps it was just the thought he preferred.
“I missed London.”
“You’re in London? Where? Because you said you wanted a total break. You said it was the only way to get over—” She was going to say “us,” but in her head the word sounded horribly solicitous. There was no way to use it without appearing to wish to apply it to them now, and even though “us” was something she had thought and not said, she felt herself redden.
He laughed. “That’s true. But you can’t legislate for accidents.”
He put one hand in his pocket; she heard his keys flinch.
“And is this an accident?”
“Oh, I get it! You wanted to bump into me. You trailed me all the way to my sad little bachelor pad with borrowed furniture, for which I have paid an extortionate deposit and now must pay an extortionate rent each month, and you kept watch on the place, possibly from behind a parked car or a lamp post, until I stepped out. And then you devised a way to walk into me.”
She looked at Mark doubtfully. The speech had an air of rehearsal. “Tell me where.”
“Don’t get worked up,” he said. “You knew I wouldn’t stay with my folks forever, right? Anyway, it’s a big place, east London.” His lips parted, and he gave her a tinted grin. She fixed on the black hole between his teeth. Somewhere in there, she supposed, was the old M
ark. Maybe this big new Mark had swallowed him whole.
His eyes cruised slowly down and up her dress. He made no effort to disguise his interest, and his unguarded gaze seemed to contain its own defense: just looking, nothing to hide.
“Nice dress,” he said. “Where are you off to?”
“I’ve been. And now I’m coming back.”
“That’s early.”
So she told him, “I was babysitting. For Eric and Michelle.” She had made the calculation quickly. Telling the truth had the drawback of suggesting a deficient social life, but the advantage of surprise. Babysitter was the last thing he would expect her to be. His final words to her—actually, not his final words, because he’d said them on New Year’s Day, a few weeks before he moved out, but they had come to seem like his last words—loitered permanently on the edge of her consciousness. Basically, she was cold and selfish and too remote ever to perform the great act of self-sacrifice that was procreation. “What’s wrong with you?” he’d cried, after years of defying her better judgment to assure her there was nothing wrong with her. She would never have kids, he’d shouted. Not with him, not with anyone. Thank God, because she’d fuck them up, silly bitch. Just like her mother had done. There goes fucked-up Mary and her fucked-up kids! She’d lost it then. Every kindness he had ever said, every reassurance he had given, was recast in an instant as the cold means by which he had tried to get what he wanted. All the worst things she thought about herself, he thought them too. Time and again he’d saved her from those thoughts, but only so he could keep her.
It was so satisfying now to break the news to him that she had been entrusted with someone else’s children. It was about as perfect a riposte as you could get. She remembered Flora’s body warm on her chest, Flora’s eyes shut against her shoulder, the immense validation of being whimpered and then slept upon. She was still enjoying the sense of that, when he laughed.
“Ha! They asked you too!”
Splinters of thoughts lodged in her head, the dark outlines of question marks looming there like alien objects on an X-ray. Michelle and Eric were still in touch with him. Michelle and Eric knew he was here and hadn’t told her. Michelle and Eric had asked him first, even though she lived right next door and he lived—well, where? They were her neighbors now, but they had gone behind her back with Mark. The shock of the betrayal was so great, some inside self seemed to limp off to lean against the wall of the house she and Mark were standing outside. “Why did you say no?” she finally asked.
“Had plans.”
There was no safe follow-up to that, so she said, “You’re not going to their barbecue, are you?” She was careful not to specify a date.
He shrugged and asked, “So if you were babysitting, what are you doing here? It’s not exactly on your way home, is it?”
“Are you kidding?” she said. “I’m the one who lives round the corner. I’ve got a right to be here.” But he was no longer paying attention to Mary. His eyes had swerved over her shoulder.
* * *
SALTY SNAIL ODOR tunneled into his muzzle. From the fresh male who was an old male who was a slithery male. Squaring up to the Female here in the outer edge of the inner tread of his patch. Snails, he thought when he saw him, so snails he smelt. Maybe because of the sloppit of shells that clustered in the wet / always wet behind this male’s fence. When he scraped under the slats and came up in the woods, his claws clipped their shells. Flip, crick, squelch. He shucked a few to warn against complacency. It was a habit, though the texture was unpleasant, and the scrape served only for back itch.
The human male walked his trail when the sky was light and when the sky was dark. Quiet feet, in and out the woods, looping the human dens. But the human male didn’t mark his territory. Didn’t want anyone to know he was there. So ho, the territory wasn’t his then, was it? No mark, nobody’s. There. Now he was watching. That’s right. My patch.
He brisked his whiskers. The air poked damp and saline. Come fresh to stalk around the human Female with sly feet and rippety eyes. Spruckling toadsome. Just the thought made his shoulder fur thicken. He took the smell of him to show the human Female. But she did not smell him. Bad human nose.
Interesting that earlier, when he went inside her den, there was no smell of this male.
* * *
MARK CLAPPED HIS hands and sprinted two steps into the street.
“What?”
“Fox. Gone now. Standing, like this, right in the middle of the road.” He dropped his shoulders and lurched his head forward, gazing right at her. Then he stood up properly again. “I swear it was staring me out.”
She peered behind her at the empty street. “What did he look like?” she asked.
Mark gave a laugh of real affection then that twisted back her head. “Er. Four legs and a tail?”
The beast had made her smile.
“Right,” he said. “I’m running late.” And then he added, as if answering a question she had thought but not voiced, “Not now. But another time. Maybe we can get a drink.”
He reached forward and hugged her with one arm. His hand held her upper back, then snaked around to her arm, which he squeezed. The muscles, she thought, as her eyes filled with water, but she refused to express surprise or pain. She was stronger now too.
“You’re wearing perfume,” he said. “You never wear perfume.” She let him think so.
On her fourth or sixth step Mary heard the squeak in her shoe catch her up, as if it had been wrong-footed by the suddenness of their farewell. She wanted to turn around, to steal a glance at Mark from behind. She felt defeated by their meeting and gripped by the urge to take something back. Some small, private piece of information. Just to know, for instance, how the new close crop behaved when it reached that part of his nape that she used to slip her fingers under his hair to feel.
But now she was moving, it was impossible to stop. She passed the house where the honeysuckle hung over the garden wall, then the house where the door was a sheet of studded metal. Mark would hear any disturbance to her footsteps as a sign that their encounter itself had been disturbing, and she didn’t want to reward him with that knowledge. She cursed the squeak in the sandal that would give her away. Meanwhile, his new navy deck shoes made no sound, and the conviction that he was watching her juddered down all the articulations of her spine. She felt her dress cling to her thighs, fold into the gap between her strides.
She rounded the corner. At the double-fronted house, the first building on her road, she stopped safely out of sight and pressed her back against the wall for cover. What the—what was Mark doing there, on the next street to hers, a short walk from her home and just a few strides from the alley to the woods?
The bricks chafed her back, their abrasions pulling at her dress, studding it with little burrs of loosened threads. What did he want? There was no doubt that Mark wanted something. He had claimed to have been on his way home—location notably unspecified. Or on his way out. Now she was unsure. How close was he living? She tried to remember what he had said, but the words slid into each other, and she could hear his voice in none of them.
She tracked back around the corner and ran to the crossroads where they had met. Four directions opened up, but there was no sign of Mark.
She needed to get home. She touched her pocket, relieved to find her keys still there. It made no sense to feel relieved, except in terms of her impression that during the course of their encounter she had been somehow plundered. A cat’s tail poked out from beneath a parked car, so dark it made a tail-shaped hole in the road, and she watched it quiver as she started to walk. She turned into her own road, pronouncing in her head the number of each house she passed, a countdown to the safety of 53. One before her own, she stopped. This hedge was so overgrown that it was impossible to see the house number. Since old Mrs. Farnworth had died, the gate was permanently shut, and even the house name was disappearing, its engraving steadily being backfilled with lichen and moss. One day soon, no one would know
the place was called Tangle Wood. She snorted. She knew these roads were once farmland—the elderly couple they’d bought the house from used to graze goats on the land that was now the woods—but it still annoyed her that people in cities named their houses as if they lived in a pastoral. Maybe she would put a nice carved sign on her front gate, saying Bricks & Mortar.
She reached her path and glanced at Eric and Michelle’s house, half expecting to see some outward sign of their betrayal. The lounge had gone dark, and the upstairs room—which had been dark—was light. She bristled at this update on the progress of their evening. But after what Mark had told her, she was going to bristle at everything Eric and Michelle did. Getting ready for separate mattresses in their boudoir of chaos.
She fished her keys from her pocket and finally turned to her own home. It gaped back at her, the front door flung wide, the house openmouthed with the soft, yellow light of its interior. Sweat ran to the dent at the base of Mary’s spine, the place where panic pooled. The lounge, bedroom, and hall were all fully illuminated, as if someone else were home and she was being summoned inside, an expected guest arriving at the appointed hour.
CHAPTER FIVE
Inside her pocket, Mary’s fingers squeezed her phone. She should call the police. But what would she say? That she couldn’t remember if she had left her own house open? That certainly sounded like a cry for help—of the clinical kind. She could knock on Eric’s door and ask him to go inside with her, but then she would have to explain that she’d popped home while babysitting, and she was unsure how Eric would feel about that. She raised her eyes to their window again, just in time to see the light go out. That was fine. Eric and Michelle were no friends of hers.
Mary looked up and down the road. The only other neighbor she knew well enough to ask was Neville, but stepping into the street, she saw that his house was dark too. She tried to replace herself at the scene, three hours ago. She had found her book and run down the stairs. At her gate, she had looked immediately right toward Eric and Michelle’s. She looked left toward it now. She had been so preoccupied with the idea of keeping their door in sight, was it possible she had forgotten to shut her own? Her heart slammed sharply against the bars of her rib cage. God, the miserable self-insufficiency of living alone. This was exactly the sort of job Mark would enjoy, if Mark were here to do it. She used to tease him about his heroic tendencies, then one evening soon after they moved in, a gang of girls materialized in front of her two streets from home. She had already handed over her phone, when they—barely teenagers—demanded her purse. In panic she had looked down the street again, just as she was doing now, only to see Mark sprinting toward her. The girls fled. It was a coincidence that he happened to be heading home at the same time, but that’s what it was like with the two of them. Back then, he made her feel safe. He was her lucky shadow. But that was a long time ago.
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