“Mark,” she said. “This isn’t right.”
Less than twenty-four hours since she found him in her kitchen, he appeared to have moved in. He came and went with his old keys. He had mown the lawn, shopped, tidied, begun to rearrange cupboards. The truth was, she had needed Mark, needed his negotiations with Eric to erase the suspicion that she might in some part be responsible for Flora’s … misadventure. But all the while Mark was here in her house, her fox was living in exile. And so was she, from the life she wanted, the one that would deliver on the happy promise of those days before her neighbors’ barbecue, when she felt she was in a relationship that was going somewhere. She shut her eyes—just to see in her lids the color of his fur.
“I need you to leave,” she said. “I mean, have some breakfast, but, you know, don’t stay here, today, tonight, tomorrow.”
Mark turned from her and rested both hands on his old wardrobe. After a moment he tilted his head sideways and stiffened, and this minute seemed to last forever, while he contemplated the long streaks of coffee, placed a hand at the top of the stain and stroked his fingers down till the runnels of their old fight ran dry. The action seemed to mollify him. He replaced his hands on the wardrobe and bowed to the door in an odd upright prayer. Then he lifted his head and smacked it hard on the wood.
“Mark! Stop it!” she cried as he tipped his head back for a second crack. “Please!”
He stayed perfectly still. Only his shoulders moved, rising gently with a long intake of breath, then slowly sinking, before he faced her calmly. “Last night, when we talked in the kitchen, I thought that was us getting back together. Why did you let me think that? Jesus, I came here to take care of you, Mary. To keep the house running. Do all the boring stuff while you put your strength into getting better. I thought … I think you need that.”
“But there’s nothing wrong with me,” she said. “I’m just exhausted, that’s all. And anxious. I’ve seen the doctor,” she said quietly. “I need to rest, give myself time. I’m loads better already.”
“This new boyfriend of yours,” he said. “I mean, where is he? If he’s so special, why isn’t he here looking after you?”
There was not much Mary could say to that. He was not here because Mark was here. She gave a shrug and watched Mark walk slowly to the blind. He whirred it upward, releasing an angry buzz. Her poor fat fly had been woken again. And then the whirring halted. Mark flapped the fly toward the open air, and she thought, as the buzzing faded, how typical that was. The way his anger transformed itself into practicality. “Wow. This will interest you,” he said warmly. “Come and look.”
It’s happened, she thought. The worst has happened. And I’m going to have to see it here with Mark. She steeled herself against the sight, so that while one foot, then the other moved, she began to picture her poor fox, his body in the road. He would be outside her house. Of course he would, because … “Oh my God!” she said, when she reached the window and finally saw, rising out of Michelle and Eric’s hedge, the sparkling For Sale board.
“I wonder what they put it on for,” he said.
* * *
AFTER MARY HAD showered and dressed, she crept downstairs. The rucksack had gone from the hall, and as she rounded the banister, she saw it in the kitchen, on Mark’s back. His breakfast bowl was already slippery with suds on the draining board. But he was busy on his phone, and when her presence did not distract him, she felt relieved he had chosen to make this easy. Then she got close enough to see that the phone in his hand was hers.
“Give that to me!” she cried. She tried to grab the mobile, but he shielded the screen with his half-turned body. “Give it!”
“You’ve got fourteen missed calls. Nine from me yesterday,” he said bitterly. “Three questions, OK? Give me three questions. I won’t ask more. I promise.”
“What are you talking about? Don’t be stupid. Give me the phone.”
He held it behind his back. “One, who is he? Two … Two, what does he do? Is he better looking than me? OK, if you don’t want to tell me, let me guess.”
“Give it back, Mark,” she yelled. Her right hand curled into a fist.
“What car does he drive? Where does he live?” He was nodding his head at every question. “And why isn’t he here when you need him? That’s what I keep coming back to. Where is he?” His face brightened. “I mean, there were only my clothes in the wardrobe,” he said, then countered himself. “But someone’s been using my aftershave.”
“Now!” she said, mauling his hand.
He slammed the phone on the worktop. “It’s pointless anyway. You’ve deleted everything.”
“And your keys.”
Mark rooted around in his pocket and lobbed them next to the phone. “Don’t you keep them on the little orange ribbon?” she said.
He looked at her, staggered. “The ribbon’s mine. You gave it to me when we moved in. Anyway, it’s at home. If you want it, you’ll have to wait till I see you next.” A tear rolled down his cheek and splattered on the lino. She touched his arm non-committally.
“Change your mind,” he said, reaching around her waist. “I’ll take the day off work again. I’ll cook for you.”
She shook her head and unbolted the back door for him, wondering if the front door would ever be the main door again.
“I lost one a bit like this,” Mark said, picking up the shoe from the sill. “Yesterday, when I saw it, I thought you somehow knew that and kept it for me. I obviously got that wrong. Deluded fuckwit that I am. What is all this junk anyway? I have to say, I am struggling to understand the mind-set of someone who keeps a filthy shoe on a window ledge.”
“How do you lose a shoe?” she said, dismissing his jibe.
“It was nicked from my fire escape by some idiot mindless enough to take only one. Mine was brand new. Unlike this,” he said, putting it back.
“Take it,” she said. “See if it matches.”
“Mine were blue.”
“This one was blue!” she said triumphantly. “Have you lost anything else? Boxers?”
Mark shook his head, baffled. “I’ve tried to help you, Mary, but you’re probably a bit beyond my reach.” He was turning to go. “Er, stay indoors, yeah?” he said, seeing her move to follow him. He nodded toward Eric and Michelle’s. “For your own sake. Keep a low profile for a couple of days.”
With Mark strolling through it, the garden looked unsettlingly different. He kicked at a dandelion clock the mower had missed, and the seeds sprayed in the sun like sparks from a bonfire. In the middle of the lawn, he stopped. Mary shrank back into the door frame. He was checking that she had obeyed him. He looked at each rear window in turn, and when he saw she wasn’t there, set off again. She lost him briefly, in the blind spot made by the house wall.
Before the shed, Mark bent to one knee. The rucksack slid off his shoulder and landed on the grass. Mary heard a dim, metallic jangle. She was running down the garden properly then: even in the shade of the lime, the thing had a nasty glint.
Mark picked up his bag and swung it over his shoulder, and when he saw her coming, he adjusted his posture to relaxed and let her reach him. The thing was an unfriendly hutch. A hutch without the wooden bits. He gave her no chance to ask. He said, “I should have mentioned the trap, but I didn’t want to worry you.”
“Trap? You’ve got to be kidding!”
He glanced up at Michelle and Eric’s closed curtains. “See.” He knelt and made his fingers walk along the grass. “Here comes a fox. Sniffs something nice. A paw treads here, and down goes the gate. Only it hasn’t done that, has it?” He rattled the door with a frown. “I have serious doubts this is going to work.”
“Who the hell put it in my garden?”
“Eric’s man. The Fox Fixer. Er … Andy. He was here yesterday, while you were sleep—” He interrupted himself. “Eric said you knew about this. Michelle cleared it with you?”
“I knew someone was coming to look, but no one said anything about
traps. I’m not having a trap in my garden. Ugh! What’s that?”
“Dog food. That’s Andy’s. And an egg. I’ve just put that there.” He managed a grin. “After what you said last night, I thought they might appreciate an egg.”
“It can’t stay here. You’ll have to take it away.”
Mark glanced again next door. His top and bottom lips were oddly offset, and the misalignment gave the appearance of anger only partially contained. “I’m not taking it anywhere,” he said equably. “The fact is, I persuaded them to try the traps because a nonviolent solution seemed important to you. Michelle was all for ordering the hit. Andy can kill twenty in a night.”
“But they don’t have permission!”
“Andy does. He gets police clearance.”
“Well, what about permission from neighbors?”
Mark laughed. “They’re not pets, Mary. Look, I’ve got to get to work. If you want traps removed, you’ll have to ask your boyfriend to do it. In fact … as a friend, Mary, I think you should ask him to come and stay with you.”
“He’s coming later,” she said, leaning across Mark to activate the door of the trap. “OK. I see how you do it. Where are the others?”
“It would be good to think you might put some food in your fridge, or keep the house tidy.”
She gave a big sigh. “You said ‘traps.’ There’s more than one, isn’t there?”
“I don’t know. Andy set them.” He rubbed at his forehead. He was such a bad liar.
“I thought you were there too.”
“Only for a bit when Eric was busy with the kids. Look, I’ve got to go now. I’m already late.”
“What will they do if they catch him?”
“Him? You mean the foxes?” He shrugged. “Some kind of humane disposal?”
* * *
MARY NEEDED A watching place. She made for the house but then swerved toward the Tangle Wood fence. The shed, the overhanging lime branches, meant that from this angle she had no way of seeing the crumbling rear wall Mark had just jumped off, and Mark had no way of seeing her. She sidled along the fence to the gap beside her shed. He had escaped this way often enough, so why shouldn’t she? The space was so tight, the splintery slats pressed against her cheek and knees, while the shed pinched her back, and her hands patted desperately for a way out. She could scarcely believe it when her fingers, instead of hitting the fence, disappeared through it. The panel stopped. She had found his hidden doorway, and it was just large enough to squeeze through.
Next door the grass had grown as tall as grass could. It feathered at the tips into hundreds of little ears, which reminded Mary that she needed to keep very quiet. She knelt and the little ears tickled her shoulders. Rafael’s scent clung to the stalks, and the greenery was thick with his musky promise. She sat back on her heels and swallowed down a strong dose of fox. From here, two yellowing trails cut diagonally through the garden. They made the shape of an arrow at whose apex she crouched. One path led to the house, one to the woods.
Mary chose the second. Calluses had begun to form on her hands, and thick gray skin crinkled the underneath of her knees, so she padded along without great discomfort. Each tread disturbed a rich swarm of musk. The Tangle Wood garden went on forever. The long grass spilled into the woods; the woods spilled into the garden. There was no wall. Eventually, something square and solid emerged from the grass a little way off. As she approached, Mary saw an old chest of drawers had been dumped and brambles grown up around it. While she paused in its cover to work out her route, she heard a sigh and, peering around her shelter, caught a glimpse of pale blue shirting.
Mark had gone no further than the other side of her wall. And now she understood why. Although he faced her, he was visible only from the waist up, his lower body obscured by a second trap. They had put this one directly behind her shed! Now she understood his insistence that she stay indoors. She was not meant to find these. The little vertical door remained in the open position and next to it lay the cause of Mark’s frown: a half-eaten rat.
She pulled her head in sharply and bunched her hair out of the way as Mark stood and looked around, shielding his eyes from the shafts of sun that slit through the canopy. At last he turned, his red backpack bobbing toward Ashland Road, his road, as she now knew it to be, and the clearing. She waited and, after a while, Mark doubled back, then veered toward the far end of the woods. When the greenery covered him, she slipped out. The second trap was stiffer than the one she had closed in her back garden, but after several tries, she joggled it shut.
She moved quickly to the clearing, staying low behind the nettles, and found the third trap, which they had left, rather unimaginatively, next to his hole. This time the mechanism slid shut with no resistance, and she was thinking how easy it had been, wondering how many more traps she would need to disarm, when a crow cawed overhead, clearly intending to give her away. She ducked into the canopy of the hazel and hid behind its trunk, just as Mark began to rematerialize from the greenery. Mary tucked in her head and waited as his footsteps crackled toward her. One espadrille loomed so close she could see the canvas faded over Mark’s big toe, a thread of frayed rope, a trodden heel. How long she stayed there she had no idea. Eventually, the footsteps faded into a thin crunch, a sound like snail shells breaking. Then the catch on a wrought-iron gate. And still Mary waited.
Long minutes passed before she dared to crawl out.
It took a while to spot the fourth trap at the far end of the woods because someone had buried it beneath a mound of leaves. As she drew close, she started at the frantic plink-plink of claws on metal. A dull, dread ache spread through her arms. Heavily she pulled a thick branch from the mound. She had to be quick. She yanked at sticks. Leaves tore in her panicked hands, and then through the foliage she caught a flash of ginger. Any minute Mark would return with the Fox Fixer. Or alone, which would be worse. Because this was the kind of glory he preferred not to share. Mary checked behind her. Must free Flight. Seconds disappearing. The crow cawing. She grabbed at the branches that jagged in the trap’s mesh. She tugged the largest free and jumped back in fright as Neville’s cat leapt at the side of the cage, his teeth slitting out of the gaps.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
It was a still afternoon. A magpie flew down from his lookout at the top of a sycamore and landed with a clack on Mary’s kitchen roof. The bird began to walk with a nod and a shuffle of tail feathers, a spill of emerald ink slicking his wings. He scritch-scratched down the tiles to the gutter, into which he directed a disdainful peck. Still no rain. Then he swooped to the laurel, snaffled a bug from the glossy leaves, and caught sight of himself in Mary’s kitchen window.
Well, now, this must be what normal life felt like, Mary thought, though it felt much better than anything she had previously thought of as normal. For the third time, she popped the door of the fridge. The snug of chicken breasts that strained against their plastic sheaths, the scrolls of fresh pasta, prime cuts of beef, game burgers, and artisan venison sausages, tower of packaged berries, and stacked cartons of milk, all individually pleased her. But what really amazed her, the sight she kept opening the fridge to admire, was its collective fullness. Both drawers of the freezer were also rammed. And still she experienced a small crease of anxiety: Was there enough?
She had laughed when the cashier announced in a bored voice, “£355.28.” Far from boring, the amount was triple anything she and Mark had spent on a single shop, and the cost proved her total abandonment to her decision. It was a vindication to wheel the trolley outside and realize that the only way to get all the bags home was in a taxi. More money! The day had been wonderfully expensive, and the house, bursting with sunshine, seemed to ripple with the freshness of the experience. A breeze came down the hall through the open door, picked up the hopeful scent of rose from the vase on the sill. She was so excited, she lifted her fox’s magic egg again, and her heart fluttered at its lightness. That was how she felt too.
In the seven hours since Mark
had left, Mary had shopped, vacuumed the ground floor, tucked her gran’s blanket over the sofa, pummeled the cushions, removed breakables from low shelves, undone Mark’s changes to her kitchen cupboards. She had almost forgotten the locksmith, when he called from the hall to say he was done; it was in the nature of Mark’s practicality to have made a copy of his house keys. Mary settled up, then double-locked the front door. The heavy new levers shifted into place with a satisfying clunk. It was twelve minutes past three. She had approximately two hours in which to ready her home and herself.
In January, when Mark moved out, Mary had felt too depressed to tidy. Then, as the house became messier, she felt too late to tidy. But today she was wiping, rinsing, and sucking away all trace of him. After months of wondering how to find it, here was her new start. She hummed along with the drone of the vacuum, nozzling the skirting boards of the study, marveling at the way each task, once completed, supplied energy for the next.
After she had tidied the desk, Mary sat on the floor and began to shelve the books from the boxes that she had halfheartedly filled at Mark’s insistence, back when he’d been concerned by her failure to pack. (This was before she told him about the inheritance.) As a promise to her future self, she slid Pride and Prejudice into the top left-hand corner. One day, when there was time, she would alphabetize. Then she lugged the vacuum to her bedroom. Dust and coins and buttons rattled up the hose. When she was done, she stuffed Mark’s leftover shirts into a bin liner, along with the wooden puzzle. Her eye fell on the bottle of cologne.
The clothes were going, so the cologne should go too. She picked it up, and the liquid slunk into an amber triangle in one corner. She had the feeling that this whole story of Mary and Mark would finish only when she reached the end of the bottle. With her wrist laid over its neck, she flipped the flask and took the draught, with her eyes shut, in the spirit of an injection. The fluid scarcely covered the glass base. This thing was nearly over.
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