“Hello, my darling,” Mary said. “How’s my gorgeous girl? You are my gorgeous girl.” When the words reached them, the fingers of the left hand fluttered singly, each pulling in a different direction, as if the hand had five heads that could not agree.
Mary thought of Michelle, alone in her house. Oh, Christ, what if her fox came back while Michelle was there? She bent over the broken rail of the cot and scooped up Flora. The baby opened her eyes and shut them again in perfunctory approval. She was with this nice mummier-than-mummy one again. At the bottom of the stairs, they paused. Today the doors to all the rooms were open. The place had been aired and scrubbed. Pine faintly scoured Mary’s nostrils. The house and her neighbors held no mystery for her, she realized, now that she was completely alone with Flora. How liberating this unimpeded intimacy felt: it seemed to Mary that the tight wooden puzzle that yesterday had encased her had cracked open and lay in pieces.
She poked her head into the lounge on her way out. “Morning, Mr. Owl.”
* * *
MICHELLE WAS IN the hall when they got home. “What’s this doing here?” she said, waving the glove from the sill. “It’s mine! It was in your kitchen. And by the way, it’s ruined. And this,” she said, picking up the doll. “I spent hours looking for this—Flora’s raggy. Also ruined.”
“Really? I found them in the garden.”
“Found them?” Michelle narrowed her eyes. “Have you noticed how the foxes don’t bring any of your things to us? Why’s that, do you think?” She held the glove by the tip of a finger. “I mean, this is rubbish now. It stinks and the leather’s torn. What were you doing with it? Why are these things in your kitchen?”
Mary shrugged. “I suppose I thought their owner would turn up. You were right, by the way. She was fine,” she said, smiling down at Flora.
Michelle rolled her eyes. “Obviously. People get so freaked out by sleeping babies. It’s always fine. As long as you remember your keys and the oven’s off.”
This sounded unlike any parenting advice Mary had heard, and she began to justify her rush to Flora. “At least we’ll know when she’s awake. We won’t be worrying.” Michelle looked unworried. She did not reach for the baby but turned again to the kitchen. The bin lid flapped shut. “I’ve dumped them,” she called. Mary heard her from the lounge. “And I’m making another tea. Do you want one?”
Mary did not. She wanted Michelle to go home and leave her in peace to enjoy this very nice cuddle with Flora and to retrieve her belongings from the rubbish.
“You need some new mugs!” Michelle sang out cheerfully.
“My good girl,” Mary whispered. She ran a critical eye around the room. Flora was the first baby to visit, and Mary tried to envisage how this scrap she was holding would live in it. A little game sprang to mind. If she had a baby, where would the baby be right now? Asleep in the corner, in one of those baskets she had seen next door, while she, Mary, read or watched TV. Or the two of them could lie together on the rug and waggle their legs in the air to pass the time. She could fall asleep on the sofa with the baby sleeping warmly on her tummy. She tickled the underside of Flora’s foot, searching for a souvenir. “Have you got a smile for me, Flora?” she asked, but the baby met her gaze with a serious look. “Smile for Mary,” Mary smiled, watching Flora watch the edges of her mouth with a quizzical expression.
“She’s not old enough. She can’t do it yet,” Michelle shouted from the kitchen.
Not for you, Mary thought. Who would? She was absentmindedly winding a few strands of Flora’s soft dark hair around her finger, thinking, if a baby lived here, this is what I would do. It was so soothing, the silkiness, twirling, its slippery escape, twirling again. Flora still refused to smile so Mary gave a sharp tug. There was no cry, just a look of absolute surprise on the baby’s face.
“Sorry, darling.”
Mary rubbed the wispy hairs from her fingers and slipped them into her pocket.
* * *
SHORTLY AFTER MICHELLE returned to the lounge, they heard Eric’s car. The engine slowed and shut off. Then the sound of him jollying George out onto the pavement.
“He’ll wonder where you are,” Mary said.
Michelle sipped her tea slowly. “Let him wonder. Let him go inside and find me not there for once. Isn’t it weird that we’ve lived next door all these years and never dropped in for tea or coffee?”
Mary rocked Flora, trying to seem too busy to answer, and Michelle said, “I suppose it’s generational. Our mothers would have been in and out of each other’s houses all the time. Probably had their own keys. We should do this more often.”
Mary smiled indulgently. “I’m thinking,” she said, “that we shouldn’t do anything too rash about the foxes. Also, I would like to pay toward the cost and be, you know, organizer.”
“Great! We always end up paying for everything,” Michelle said. She gave a sharp double take, apparently noticing Flora for the first time, and her head continued to move from side to side while she stared at the baby, as if there were a thought inside that needed to be rocked to sleep or refused. “You’re really good with her, you know,” she said sadly. “You’re really good with her.”
They listened to Eric and George going inside, the door closing behind them. They must have removed their shoes because their footsteps petered out, and no further sounds traveled through the blue wall. In the silence, the two women sensed Eric’s searching for them, a moment which Michelle evidently wished to prolong. But there was nothing more to say, and though Michelle kept sipping at it, her excursion was cooling in her cup.
Mary waited till the last minute to hand over Flora. From the front step, she watched them take the half-dozen strides to their own path. Then she called across, “Come and see me soon, Flora.” That was another nice thing about babies. Once you knew the right tone, you could address only them.
* * *
IN THE GARDEN, Mary dragged the blanket to the shade and lay down, hoping to lose the empty space beside her in the comfort of his scent. Michelle’s plans were troubling. And on top of that she had to manage the thickening sense that her relationship with her fox was precarious. It felt suddenly conditional—she had no idea on what. Now she was going to spend the rest of the day wondering if he would visit in the late afternoon, as he had daily for the past few weeks, or if his disappearance yesterday was the start of a new era, one that began just as abruptly as the last, in which he ceased to be part of her life. The day was crawling past in terror toward the hour, somewhere around 4 or 5 p.m., when she would have her answer. She tried to prepare herself for the worst, to persuade herself that today was tomorrow, that she was already surviving without him, that this was what it felt like to live without your cure.
She chucked aside her book; it always ended right, but sometimes, not today, the rightness felt more satisfying than others. To keep busy and to get a head start on Eric and Michelle, she searched on her phone for a fox rescue service. It seemed unlikely that Hackney would have such a thing. Sure enough there were dozens of wildlife charities but nothing specifically for foxes. She kept scrolling the results, and on the third page her thumb nudged the words Fox Ambulance. But the picture took ages to load, and in the end she had to swipe it away. In any case, a rescue might involve trapping him or taking him … She just couldn’t think her way out of this mess. The rest of the afternoon hung in the air. Time slowed, just as it had done after Mark left. The trees waved gently from right to left, right to left, like a gif. All was quiet in the gardens either side. All was quiet. All was quiet. Until at last she was awoken by her own name.
“Did I wake you?” Eric was looking over the fence.
“No, I was just dozing.”
“I woke you then?”
“What’s up?”
“I thought you might have Michelle over there, but obviously not.”
“Michelle? She came round this morning. She went home, didn’t she? I mean, of course she went home. I saw her. She was on your do
orstep.”
He was leaning on the fence, and he flopped his head onto his arms and let out a loud groan. His crown had caught the sun.
“When did you last see her?” she asked.
He shook his head and said softly, “I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know. I just don’t know what the way out of this is.”
Thank God for the fence, thank God for not being tall enough to need to reach over and hug Eric. He looked up and smiled. “Sorry, mate. You’ve probably seen enough of us this weekend.”
“Has she got Flora?”
“Yes. And that’s a good thing, you know, because it means she can feed her. Look, forget I mentioned it. I only asked because she said she was going to see you. But don’t worry. I have become quite good at finding her.” He gave a rueful smile and clapped both hands on the fence. “Oh yes, I’m getting to know all her places.”
“Do you want a hand?”
“No, thanks. I’ll start out there,” he said, and Mary was surprised to see him nod toward the woods. “Georgie will help, won’t you, George?” he said, looking down between his arms. “He thinks it’s hide-and-seek. You’d be surprised how many times we’ve found her there.”
At dusk Mary resumed the previous day’s post at the window, at the back door, all the usual checkpoints. The lights in the kitchen blew, the clock on the oven reset to 00:00, and she let it stay like that. Zero was the time she felt. His hour came and went. His next hour came and went. Again and again she gave him one last chance to appear, but he never took the chance. Damn the seam in the window for encouraging her with false hope. She returned to it over and over, putting her faith in its capacity to buckle experience, to let you see one thing while believing in the possibility of another. He was there; he was not there. In the end she gave up looking. Twilight came through the wrinkle, the garden fanning out into a kaleidoscope of darkness. Her phone beeped only once: Eric, telling her all was well in their world. Yeah, right. She turned in early.
Some things were best left for the night to fix.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Way up in the sky, an owl hooted. Mary stopped. She had read that there were owls nesting in the warehouse by the canal, but this was the first time she had heard one. He had chosen the perfect midpoint of the night: too late for the rumble of traffic, too early for birdsong. She stood in the darkness with her arms lifted clear of the nettles, waiting to hear him again. The crisp, sharp air turned small sounds into big sounds. She rubbed her ear on her shoulder, trying to shake off the high-pitched whine of two winged things arguing in her hair. Something dripped nearby, though it hadn’t rained for weeks. Tonight the woods gave her the creeps. And she was just another creep, creeping through them. She had no choice. If he was alive, she had to find him.
Her feet stabbed at the throng of stinging nettles, warping their hairy spines. It cheered her, the papery rustle their leaves made as they fell, dry tongues rasping last words on the woodland floor. Another one down! Another few inches closer to his den beneath the hazel. Too bad for those nettles. She had her own troubles. Her cheek blazed with their burns. And all the while, this hollowed-out feeling was growing within, as if someone were scooping out her heart until only thin, cold scrolls clung to the sides. He was gone. Gone. It donged over and over in her head, this thought, a gong that kept striking her loss—Gone!—that had rung out of the unquiet silence of the house and turfed her from bed, because what was the point in sleeping, just to wake to another day without him?
She had hoped he would come to meet her. But every step took her closer to the possibility that he was lost for good. Suppose Michelle’s idiot brother or one of his friends had found him? She considered that unlikely, but there were other worries. He had seen her at the barbecue. What if he believed she was part of the hunt? He would surely sever all contact. She was so agitated by these thoughts that she continued to edge forward with her hands aloft even though she had plowed right through the nettle bed, and the weeds had shrunk to a kickable kerfuffle around her ankles. She dropped her arms. The sense of order and governance in this bit of the woods gave her the impression that she was approaching his den. She walked more briskly, and when she glanced up, his hazel flared darkly on the path before her. In relief she made a grab for the nearest rod but lost her footing when it flew down under her weight, then pinged back up, clacking away with the other sticks at its clever trick. The woods thrilled with the clattering of canes. She had rung his bell.
Mary took a step back from the place she supposed the hole to be—in effect, his front door—and waited. It was a new experience to be in the position of solicitous partner, and after a while she tired and sat. The air was warm. The sky was cloudless. The ground was soft with mulch. But even as she soothed herself with these comforts, she felt miserably out of place. Just being in his world should have brought consolation, but instead darkness rubbed its face in her face, solidified space so that all she could feel was obscurity. She was crumpling where she sat, her comfortable curl beginning to unravel as if she were being dismantled against the instructions. She pictured Flora—tucked inside her wadded envelope, tucked inside her cot—and envied her belonging.
Mary herself was barely a pinprick on the world. No one would notice if she were gone instead of sitting here with her face tipped to the sky. Not the stars or the airplanes twinkling overhead, not the hundreds of people inside those dots. That’s where civilization was: up there, glowing with the borrowed light of street lamps and tower blocks. Down on the ground was desolate. It seemed to her that the purple haze of London’s night sky had been lowered like a lid of light over the clearing to seal all the darkness in place and her inside. She was a tiny specimen in a giant jam jar, thoughtfully provided with a twig floor and cuttings of familiar habitat, awaiting examination through the convex lamp lens above. See how insect Mary burrows into the mulch for comfort. Someone bring her an insect friend.
She strained at the shadows, and everywhere she looked the night mask teased her. His ears pricked in the clumps of tall grass. His triangulated stare fixed her from the undergrowth. Each time his features sharpened into view, she let herself think that this time it must be him. But then his face receded again. There were dozens of them, these false foxes. They had her surrounded. Fantastical creatures with bramble legs and flickering fern tails and fidgety mice or haunchy toads for their wary footsteps. But he, her true fox, was nowhere to be seen.
In panic, she imagined him arriving, not recognizing her (or, worse, recognizing her) and leaving again. Maybe he would see her from afar and wonder what she was, a mysterious object disturbing the landscape. She was beginning to doubt she had the courage to last till morning, when she caught a faint, smoky tang from the direction of Eric and Michelle’s.
* * *
THERE WAS A shape way downwind in the clearing that looked like none of the bushes he knew there. Stop.
Hitch a paw midair.
A new thing. Not a bush. Bushes grow slowly. A stump. Stumps come sudden. Like—This. It was pleasant, the fresh sawdust powdering his hind claw while. Focus. Eyes on the thing. He inhaled. Juicy, leaky blackbird feathered his snout.
His paw hung.
New is danger is wait.
The thing could be anything. Stuff flew into this land. Humans. Food and not food for sorting and scenting. A big fox. Just waiting outside the earth. To fight for it. His worst nightmare. This thing was still with the quivering stillness of the living.
He couldn’t get a clear scent. When he lifted his nose, the wind, not really wind, was blowing the wrong way. All he could smell was. Blackbird, beautiful blackbird. He opened his jaws. The bird thudded to the dust. Dead, but. Take no chance. His paw clamped it. Claws parted feathers, silfling barbs. His mouth filled wet while he watched this thing too big for a cat, too unhappy alone to be a cat. He triffed his paw where the blackbird’s heart tickled his footpad and pierced it. He put a new paw on the bird, licked the first paw. Replaced the first paw, licked the second paw …
He was doing this when the thing quavered, and he recognized the song of the human Female.
* * *
MARY HAD SPOKEN quietly. But the trees were listening, and all the half-awake things in the woods were listening, and in her ears her voice boomed. She scrambled to a stand, tugging down the ankles of her jogging bottoms against another assault on the nettles. Her ears buzzed with a distant drone. She strained in the direction of the scent, trying to glean some reliable outline from the darkness. “Are you there?” she called again. She felt herself to be in the eye of an intense, unlocatable gaze. Not a shadow flinched. She stared at the place where she thought she smelt him.
“It’s me,” she said again.
She pictured his ears pricked into two pointed portals, opening up their dark, Gothic chapels, snuffing out all the night sounds like wicks till the only flickering was her breath. She inhaled with a fluty whistle, which winged its way toward him. Soft and sad.
His ear wavered. But. New information. Another noise. Upwind. Leave the bird / check the fresh noise. Scrape out a quick hole, flick her with earth, give her a squirt. An ear peaked at. Cloud of noise. Rumbling upwind causing. Its own wind to disrupt the. Round and round sounds and smells sliced into scuttle and leaf blurt dust the world stirred into a swirl in this. Dark growl that swallowed—
A police helicopter.
How odd, Mary thought. It usually came on Saturday nights. The sound shook up Shepherds Bridge Walk and began to thicken overhead, churning the sky on the other side of this dense screen of leaves. It hovered above her as pure noise, its blades scissoring ominously at the stars, its barrel bulk hammering at the soles of Mary’s feet. She put her hands to her ears. She could almost feel her teeth rattle. Three years since she saw the dentist. You would imagine they were looking for her, the way they hung there, staring.
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